The Battle Royale, a fight to the death, and the game of choice for most players these days. If you haven’t been living under a rock you’ll know that first there were two battle royale games that competed to attract the most players - Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG (pronounced pub-gee) as it’s best known.
In 2019 though, Apex Legends came on the scene, and so now we have a new contender for best battle Royale game. Within days, millions of people were playing Aepex. The question we are all asking now is which game is the best? Who will win in this battle royale of battle royales?
We’ll start with PUBG. Released by the PUBG Corporation in 2017, a short time before Fortnite Battle Royal came out. The concepts of both games are of course very similar. You and 99 other players get dropped into a world and you have to survive. Those worlds, though, are very different. As we’ve said in other shows, PUBG is more realistic, grittier, and with PUBG you might be traversing large tracts of unforgiving land to scavenge for goods and find the best position to be in.
This is the main pull for many of its fans who say Fortnite is too chaotic, cartoonish, and that PUBG is a more serious combat simulator. Some critics called it “The best multi-player game ever” and by mid-2017 across all platforms the game was seeing around 87 million daily players, and over 400 million players in total. The mobile version alone at that point had over 225 million players, with many of those players being from China and India.
2017 and 2018 were good years for PUBG and it was nominated for more awards than we can mention. It won quite a few too, but then the Battle Royale competition really picked up. As for Fortnite, released by Epic Games not long after PUBG came out, for a while it was in the shadow of PUBG but that would soon change. Many have said it’s more likeable to a larger audience due to the fun graphics style speed with which you can find some action and it soon had millions of players itself. As the gaming press pointed out in 2018, it seemed like Fortnite was winning the battle to get the most players.
In terms of awards, Fortnite easily wins the battle there. It has had more nominations and more wins. According to the website PCGames both games have a similar number of daily active players, but Fortnite is much more popular in western countries. But these are just numbers, and they don’t tell you what is actually the better game. But first we should introduce the new kid on the block, Apex Legends. Released by Respawn Entertainment and partially based on the studio’s Titanfall series, it came out of nowhere in February 2019 and in its first week already had over 25 million players.
Give it a month and it would have over 50 million players in total. It’s still early days, but the gaming media is already saying that Apex is well-positioned to take on Fortnite and potentially leave it behind. Again, PUBG actually has as many players across all platforms as Fortnite, but in the western media it’s Fortnite that is often mentioned as the main player on the battle royale scene. In terms of numbers, Apex is still well behind the other two behemoths, but there is a chance it will catch up. It smashed a few records, but we’ll have to wait to see if it smashes more.
So, when we compare them all which is the best? As we said when we compared just Fortnite and PUBG, the former is nice on the eyes and people just love the creativity of the building aspect. It’s good to watch, and that’s why the most popular streamers such as Ninja have millions of viewers watching their streams. PUBG on the other hand can be more intense, with a feeling as if you are really there and fighting for your life. It’s more down to Earth, and some say more compelling. It might not be as nice to look at, but a real-life battle Royale wouldn’t be either.
Where Apex is different is that you can choose from a number of characters with special powers. It’s entertaining, rather than intense. To add to that, Apex is a lot more futuristic-looking, and that might fit better with fans of sci-fi. In terms of the maps, as we said, PUBG has a larger area where one can get lost for a long time. It can be a foreboding terrain and players are often alone for large chunks of time. Fortnite and Apex both have more immediate action going on inside their smaller maps. PUBG might have more maps, but Fortnite updates its one map more often.
Apex is still new, but at the time of this writing, it also has plans to change its map around. In terms of weapons, all three games have a bounty of them to choose from and all games don’t differ much in this respect. Weapons are a bit more realistic in PUBG and Apex though. In the early days of Fortnite vs PUBG it really was a case of if you wanted a realistic, militaristic game or if you wanted a cartoonish fight to the death with some really incredible creative elements like building. It seems Fortnite won this battle. It was just more fun overall, according to most gamers. Then Apex came along, and it was almost as stylish as Fortnite, and also had great gun-play of PUBG.
It has combined some of the best of both worlds, and the critics don’t disagree. It goes without saying, that its burgeoning popularity is also down to the fact that it’s new. Players always want a novel experience, something unique to dig their teeth into. And like Fortnite, it’s also free, which always helps a game’s popularity. But of course even though they’re free, both Fortnite and Apex still make an obscene amount of money from people buying items in the game. In all of the games you are dropped into a map and the space in which you play will shrink and in all of them there are a number of weapons on offer, including pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, grenades, etc, so not much difference there. Where there is a major difference is the cap of players.
In Fortnite and PUBG it’s 100, but in Apex it’s 60. The other major difference is you don’t have the option to build very cool things in Apex, but then you can choose various players with different kinds of powers. In Apex you will also be joined by two other different characters each with their own set of powers. This makes for a much more defined battle and fewer surprises, whereas in Fortnite you will have to be more creative. Your power is all on you, and you can innovatively defend just as much as you can attack. We would say that if you are very creative, or like to play alone, then Fortnite is better for you. You can play in teams or duos in Fortnite, but it’s also ideal for the solo-artist. If you are a team player, you should go for Apex, especially as you can revive your fellow teammates when they go down. That is one cool addition and can give you a sense of really working in a team. Apex players can also enjoy a faster-paced game and the players have more movement abilities.
That might be good for some people, but it’s also not very realistic. Soldiers don’t jump about that way, and neither Fortnite or Apex will give you a feeling of being in a real fire fight. You can’t really suspend disbelief like you can in PUBG. Now let’s look at what others around the internet are saying about this battle of Battle Royale games. One player on Quora who has played all three games chooses Apex as the best, for the main reason that he likes its fast pace and good in-game rewards system. He also likes the fact he can choose a character that has certain abilities. Many more chose Apex for the same reasons. Nonetheless, you’ll find people on forums saying exactly what we said, that Fortnite and Apex are very similar but PUBG will attract a certain player that might see himself as something of a soldier.
Still, many people on forums insist that PUBG is dead, at least in the west, and that now it’s a one on one battle between Fortnite and Apex. Some of those people said that while Apex is outgunning Fortnite right now, that’s only because it’s new. Fortnite has always been good at changing things up and will in time prove to be way more popular than Apex. That all depends of course on how Apex evolves, but player numbers did drop when updates were slow to come this year. What it really comes down to is preference. Do you prefer realistic war movies or do you prefer superhero films? If you want something closer to real action, PUBG is without doubt the best. If you want to be carried away by a fiction, then Apex and Fortnite are the choice. If you’re a team player then Apex is better, but if you love to be creative and build then Fortnite is the best.
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