Realm Royale, the battle royale game designed by Heroic Leap Games and Hi-Rez Studios, live streamed a patch notes show in which they announced significant changes to the gameplay.
Realm Royale attained an all-time peak of 100K players on Steam on June 10th. This was due largely to popular streamers such as Ninja streaming and enjoying Realm Royal’s unique gameplay combat mechanics, such as turning into a chicken when you’ve been downed.
Since that time, however, the player base has declined sharply and many fans have been critical of the patch releases which have added greater RNG into the game. Drybear, Design Director and Brand Director, and Erez, CEO of Hi-Rez, explained what changes were coming in the next 2-3 patches that would overhaul the game.
The biggest change coming to Realm Royale is the removal of classes. The five classes in Realm Royale (Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Assassin and Engineer) each had their own unique abilities and weapons that could be found and crafted, providing each class with a different play style for players to experiment with.
In future patches, everyone will start off as the basic character and will be able to pick up any weapon or ability that they find. This is to prevent a common occurrence in Realm Royale: starting a game as a certain class and having to disenchant a significant amount of the abilities and weapons found in chests or loot because they could not be used by the class. It will also increase the combinations of abilities that can be used.
The second biggest change is the removal of armour. Previously players spawned with a certain armour level and could acquire better armour from chests, looting and using the forge to increase their max armour HP. Runes are replacing armour and many of the passive abilities such as slow health regeneration that used to belong to certain classes. Runes include increasing chicken HP, faster mount movement speed and faster chicken movement speed to name a few. Players can have up to 6 runes to alter and buff their play style. The hosts of the patch notes described this whole change as building your class in-game, rather than pre-selecting one and not being allowed to deviate in any way.
Hitscan weapons are also being removed. These have caused great debate in the Realm Royale community due to the obvious advantage of hitscan vs projectiles on a large battle royale map.
The full patch notes are yet to be released, but the development team at Heroic Leap Games seems hopeful that these major overhauls to the game will increase player retention and get more people to pick up the game and play it. Hints of a console version on the horizon and the game leaving alpha are also good signs of things to come.
A vod of the twitch stream can be found here: Patch Notes Vod