‘Fall Guys’ Was Ready to Be a Hit

Just when we thought the Battle Royale had already had its moment, Fall Guys comes out of nowhere with a fresh new take on the genre. Unlike the vast majority of Battle Royales though, this time you aren’t using guns in a winner takes all shoot out, but participating in game-show like obstacle courses and mini-games. We discuss Fall Guys early success, what’s new in the world of Frog Fractions, and more on this episode of Waypoint Radio.

You can listen to the full episode and read and excerpt below.

Patrick: You load it up, and it literally is like the Fortnite UI, here's your floppy gooey playdough character, in a corner is how much you've filled a meter to level up, here's the store that you can tab over to, here's where you are in season one of Fall Guys. They've built in a lot of the stuff that often games build in retroactively, which is "ah shit, our games a success, what are the things that you build in to retain people past the initial week or two of interest.” This game has it immediately. It is so polished and ready to roll to retain people and to turn it into like a real force.

Austin: For me it's very much [that] I've been curious what is going to try to take that core [concept]. Underneath the battle royale wasn't shooting, it wasn't hiding in bathtubs. it was "here a 60 or 100 people doing a thing at the same time" and everything that can kind of come from that. And so I've been curious to see who's gonna play on that side of the battle royale's success. So seeing this take off is not that surprising to me but the stuff that you're saying about it just being ready to go as a product is not what I expected from seeing trailers and stuff. No offense to the team,  but I watched a trailer for this a year ago and I did not expect there to be legs on it in that way.

Patrick: That was one of the questions I [had], alright for real though, how late in the game was it like "we need to add season passes and have them be there day one" because it just not the thing that usually see, especially for [smaller publishers]. Yeah, I mean Devolver is, you know, calling them a small publisher is probably both [accurate] and not accurate at the same time anymore, they'd like to pretend they're smaller than they are but this game is going to be, already is, huge. They like having their scrappy image but at this point they're probably closer to a medium tier publisher with the amount of successes they've had at this point. I was just impressed by the level of polish and forethought they had about how do we make this stick around past people's attention window.

This transcript was edited for length and clarity. Discussed: Frog Fractions Game of the Decade Edition: Hop's Iconic Cap DLC 7:47, Banners of Ruin 26:13, Fall Guys 30:49, Necrobarista 53:22, Hex 1:05:13,News 1:12:02, Spelunky 2 1:33:09

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