PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may have popularised the genre inspired by the Japanese movie, but it’s not the only battle royale game pitting players against each other in desperate fights to the death. Below are 11 games, modes and mods that you should check out if you can’t get enough of hunting your fellow man.

GAMES

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

Let’s get the current top dog out of the way first, shall we? PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, is still in Early Access, but it’s already swallowed up the lives of millions of players. In each match, 100 survivors are air dropped into a bucolic Russian island, seemingly abandoned during or just after the Soviet era. It’s a huge place, but the play area is always shrinking, forcing players to race towards safety on foot or using cars, bikes and boats, all while trying to murder each other with a wide range of guns and melee weapons. It’s a game filled with long moments of quiet tension, punctuated by chaotic, nerve-racking battles.

H1Z1: King of the Kill

Another Early Access game, H1Z1: King of the Kill was spun out of Daybreak’s zombie survival game. The survival aspect became its own separate game, Just Survive, while the more competitive, PvP side of things became King of the Kill. Frenetic and fast-paced, it’s more of an arena shooter than a game like PUBG, so you won’t have to wait long to get into a gunfight. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene was also a consultant on H1Z1 before making Battlegrounds.

Ark: Survival of the Fittest

Like H1Z1, Ark: Survival of the Fittest is another arena-style battle royale game, and is similarly a spin-off. Its hook, not surprisingly given its progenitor, is that there are dinosaurs and monsters to watch out for, as well as 71 human adversaries potentially hunting you down. Other elements from Survival Evolved have made it in, too, including riding and taming creatures, tribes and traps. Unfortunately, it’s struggled to retain its playerbase in the face of PUBG.

The Culling

If you prefer battle royales of the more intimate variety, there’s The Culling and its 8-player and 16-player blood-soaked arenas. Though it’s fast-paced, there’s still time to craft equipment and set traps. The central conceit is a big draw, too, set as the game is in a crazed game show for sadists. It’s been in Early Access since March 2016, and while it was popular initially, it looks like player numbers might be on the wane.

Last Man Standing

Budget PUBG is probably the clearest way to describe Last Man Standing. It’s set on an island with 100 players trying to kill each other, the play area is a big circle that shrinks over time, mods can be scavenged and attached to guns, it’s got loot crates—there’s a long list of similarities, but Last Man Standing is free. It’s not quite as polished as its premium counterpart, however.

GAME MODES

GTA Online, Motor Wars

GTA Online recently got a competitive mode called Motor Wars, which has some similarities to popular battle royale games: a shrinking kill box, arriving from the sky, then finding the best weapons possible on the ground. The key difference is that it's more focused around vehicle combat, and all the cars are marked on the map, as well as the players driving them. The shrinking kill space provides a similar amount of tension, though, and there's tons more potential in building on the idea, given the size of the map they've got to play with. Sam had fun with it, even though it has some flaws.

Fortnite

Epic has announced a new battle royale mode for their base-building romp, Fortnite. It’s due out this month and will see up to 100 players duking it out until there’s only one left. The mode was put together by Epic’s Unreal Tournament team, who were busy experimenting while Fortnite was in development. The scavenging and building from the game’s regular mode will also feature in this new one, so you’ll be able to create bases and fortifications to hole up in while you wait for everyone else to die. They’ll probably be doing the same, mind you.

Unturned

Unturned is a blocky, free-to-play zombie survival game, but it’s also got a battle royale arena mode. Players are spawned at random points on the map and must hunt each other down while a barrier closes in, damaging those outside it. It’s as straightforward as a battle royale can be, but there’s one odd wrinkle: you can’t damage people with your fists, so you’d better get a weapon as quickly as you can.

MODS

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale in Arma 2, Arma 3

Before PUBG, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene created DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of the original DayZ mod for Arma 2, inspired by the Japanese film. When players started leaving DayZ for the standalone Early Access version, Greene switched to developing Battle Royale in Arma 3. Later, it was licensed to Daybreak for H1Z1 and became the foundation for King of the Kill. A lot of Battlegrounds’ features started in PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, and Arma 3’s realistic aesthetic isn’t far of PUBG’s.

Rust: Battle Royale

Rust: Battle Royale is an unofficial mode for Facepunch Studio’s survival game, made by Intoxicated Gaming. Inspired by the Arma 3 Battle Royale mod, it combines the brutality of Rust—you even begin naked—with the race to be the final person left alive. All the survival and crafting elements have been torn out, with the focus being entirely on gearing up and murdering your fellow players in a map that becomes smaller and smaller as bombs start to fall.

Garry's Mod Battle Royale

Created last year, this Garry’s Mod game mode, like so many in this list, owes its creation to the Arma 3 mod, being a lightweight recreation of it designed by IC4RO so they could play it with their friends. Since then, however, it’s become popular, no doubt helped by the fact that Garry’s Mod is considerably cheaper than Arma 3 or Battlegrounds. 

Most patch notes are boring. Fixed a bug that stopped a menu from opening properly. D.Va's Defense Matrix doesn't last as long. Wukong's attack speed is 10 percent slower. That's the usual stuff, chronicling important but dull balance changes across years of a game's life. And then there are patch notes like this: "Added cat butchery." "Made all undead respectful of one another." "Tigerman does not have ears."

That's the good stuff.

Those are the kinds of wonderfully crazy patch notes Dwarf Fortress has given us over the years. Determined to top the absurdity of Dwarf Fortress's bizarre changelogs, I put on my deerstalker, grabbed my magnifying glass, and set out to find the strangest patch notes in the history of PC gaming. These absurdities are the result. 

Rimworld

Alpha 12

• Colonists will visit graves of dead colonists for a joy activity. 

Alpha 16

• New alert: Unhappy nudity 

Alpha 17

• Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors. 

---

Conan Exiles

Patch 15.2.2017

• Rhinos should no longer try to walk through players 

Patch 15.2.2017

• Emus now give less XP 

Patch 23.02.2017

• Players can no longer use chairs to travel great distances 

Update 24

• Imps, ostriches and other non-humanoids no longer go bonkers if you hit them with a truncheon 

Update 25

• Seeing dead people can now lead to great rewards 

Update 28

• Fixed a small issue where a player in some instances could walk underwater. 

--- 

Rust

Update 149

• Bucket no longer hostile to peacekeepers 

Update 152

• Pumpkins only have 1 season (instead of 7) 

August 28, 2014

• Bald inmate digging grows hair bug fixed 

---  

Terraria

1.2.0.2

• The game will no longer look for the square root of zero. 

1.2.1

• Mice can no longer spawn in hell 

1.2.3

• Red Stucco no longer spreads corruption. 

---  

The Sims 4

02/04/2016

• Sims carving pumpkins or working at a woodworking table will no longer ignore Sims who die near them. 

02/04/2016

• Babies will no longer send text messages congratulating your Sims on their marriage, engagement, or pregnancy. 

01/12/2017

• Confident children will no longer get a whim to practice pick-up lines. 

05/25/2017

• Babies will no longer change skin tone when they are picked up. 

---  

Don't Starve

January 29th 2013

• Darts and poop won't magically accumulate at the world origin. 

October 1st 2013

• You can no longer trade with sleeping pigs. 

November 19th 2013

• You can properly deploy or murder captured butterflies 

---  

Ark: Survival Evolved

254.9

• Beers can no longer be eaten by Dinos 

---  

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

1.2

• Taking items from dead owned creatures is no longer a crime 

--- 

World of Warcraft

1.3.0

• The quest NPC Khan Jehn no longer becomes confused and unresponsive 

1.4.0

• Roast Raptor now has an more appropriate inventory sound 

2.1.0

• Fixed an error where some characters appeared to be drinking while standing up 

2.4.0

• Zapetta will no longer become confused about whether the zeppelin in Orgrimmar is arriving or leaving 

3.1.0

• Yaaarrrr! now has a detailed tooltip 

--- 

Uplink

1.314 

• Fixed : Dead or jailed people don't answer their phones 

1.35 

• Fixed : LAN Spoof progress graphic overflow 
• Fixed : Time freezing and unclickable buttons on computers running for several weeks

--- 

Everquest

July 10, 2001 

• Reevaluated the values of the various fish fillets 

--- 

August 15, 2001 

• The Giant Tree Flayer is now Large instead of Tiny 

December 6, 2001 

• Fixed a bug that was preventing characters from being bald 

--- 

Two Worlds 2

1.4

• Horse behaviour - improved 

--- 

Battlefield 1942

1.2 

• Bots do not jump in and out of vehicles anymore 

--- 

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

1.02 

• Dead party members will no longer show up later in the game. What with thembeing dead and all 

--- 

Black and White

1.1 

• The word "Death" no longer said when villagers die of old age
• Creature doesn't become constipated if you punish him for pooing 

--- 

No One Lives Forever 2

1.3 

• Fixed problems with camera rotation after slipping on a banana 

--- 

Hitman: Codename 47

Patch 1 

• Dancer in "Gunrunner's Paradise" is no longer confused by dead bodies 

Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios, developer of Rust, reported on Twitter today that the 329,970 copies of the Early Access survival game have been refunded on Steam. According to Newman (in another tweet), that comes to around 6% of all copies sold. (Extrapolating from that, it appears Steamspy's estimation of 5,509,983 Rust owners is pretty close to the mark.) In terms of dollars, those refunds total an eyebrow raising $4.3 million USD.

It's probably not quite sensible to look at the $4.3 million as a straight-up loss of revenue. Since Steam began allowing refunds of games played for fewer than two hours, customers have presumably become much more cavalier about purchasing and trying games, knowing there's a safety net if they decide they don't want to keep them.

I asked Newman via Twitter what the most common reason given for requesting a refund was, and he replied "Not fun followed by bad performance - which is pretty fair I think."

The latest update to the multiplayer survival goat rodeo Rust makes what sounds like a number of fairly significant changes to gameplay, particularly regarding guns, which for better or worse are an important part of the game. Facepunch's Maurino Berry explained in Devblog 162 that the changes to firearms—three of them, really—are meant to address complaints that the recoil in Rust is "screwy and unfun," and collectively make the action "feel a little bit more in line with traditional first-person shooters." 

"First, you're going to notice less horizontal recoil so it'll be easier to maintain your target. Secondly, you're going to notice that, for rifles, the first shot is pretty much dead accurate and the longer you hold down the trigger the more inaccurate it gets by way of an increasing aimcone. This means you'll be able to tap at targets for high accuracy or you can risk spraying more rounds down range which are less likely to hit their targets," Berry wrote. "Lastly, I've implemented recoil compensation. This means if you're holding down the trigger and the weapon is riding up, as soon as you let go of the trigger it will correct back to the original aim position." 

The cost of weapons have been adjusted slightly as well: The Thompson now costs ten HQM (high quality metal) less to craft than prior to the update, while the pump shotgun and laser sight cost five HQM less. Shotgun accuracy is also going up a bit thanks to the discovery that accuracy "cones" were actually being calculated as accuracy "pyramids." And if, for some reason, you don't like the new recoil compensation feature, it can be disabled by entering "player.recoilcomp false" at the console. 

Other changes in the update include the addition of drop boxes, the return of dynamic moon phases, and the start of a "much-need overhaul" of Hapis Island. A quick rundown of everything new and changed can be pumped directly into your eyeballs via the update video below.

Facepunch Studios boss Garry Newman has some advice for Rust players who have grown bored with the game: Stop playing it. He acknowledged that the sentiment may come across as dismissive, but said in a message on Reddit that it's necessary to break the "ping-pong loop" that's holding the game back from full release. 

"I'm noticing a pattern, and we need to address it. It's something we need to get past as a community, not only because it's getting boring but because it has wider implications," he wrote. "We're stuck in ping pong loop. We release an update, you love it for a month, you get bored, blame the system, bitch for a few months, then we release another update—and the same thing happens." 

His concern is that the pattern will persist indefinitely, because the real problem isn't that the new systems are better than the old ones, but simply that they're "fresher." But Facepunch obviously can't keep overhauling the game forever, and thus Newman suggests a clean break for those unhappy with Rust. But he also asked that people who do end up quitting, or who think his attitude is unfair, give thought to "whether we have given you enough entertainment over the last three years to justify pocketing your $20" before getting angry.

"If you're interested in the game, if you play regularly and still get enjoyment when you play—we're definitely interested to hear what you think. We especially love hearing your stories, watching your videos, seeing your screenshots and paintings—all things that this subreddit has been very low on," Newman wrote. "If we want to leave Early Access then breaking this loop has to be part of that plan. We have a pretty good idea on how to push forward with Rust, but none of it is going to make the game more appealing to people that have spent their last 1,000 hours hating it." 

As silly as it sounds, it's actually very easy to find players with more than 1000 hours in Rust giving it negative reviews on Steam. Two of them are on the front page, along with a few 100-plus-hour negative reviews; one of them, with more than 1200 hours on record, came about at least in part in response to Newman's statement. It's an unfortunate reaction, but probably inevitable, too: Sooner or later, every game developer has to settle on what exactly they're trying to make, and no matter how good that final concept may be, somebody, somewhere, is going to be mad about it.  

This past week's Rust update brought some big changes to the way the first-person survival game works, including the removal of the XP and levelling system.

Developer Facepunch Studios detailed why players won't level up in Rust anymore, noting that it "completely changed the feel of Rust as a sandbox." Facepunch's Maurino Berry explained how the game "was no longer about new encounters and enjoying your time in the game world, but instead about how to level up as quickly as you can." This resulted in the game becoming boring once you had levelled to the max, making for an unsustainable gameplay model.

"New items we haven't even thought of yet would need to be hacked into certain levels, which would cause a never ending balance nightmare and item bloat (it was already ridiculous when you'd reach a level and have 12 things unlocked)," Berry continued.

"Eventually we'd like to never have to wipe and just have decay and resource management take care of the server, [but] XP was not compatible with this goal without all kinds of workarounds and hacks forced in like some sort of prestige system."

Berry concluded with the fact that XP negated the "'making lemonade out of lemons' feel" that Rust excels at, where your loadout would be consisted of whatever you could find and use.

Replacing XP is the component system, which makes everything craftable from the moment you start. This means no more locked items or blueprints. However, items beyond basics require the use of a component to craft, and these can only be discovered in the world components can't be crafted. Additionally, players will see the return of radiation, which has been remixed a bit. You can read more about the latest update on the Rust devblog here.

One note that Berry makes is an issue where the game chugs and pauses periodically. He says that if players experience this, they should press F7 and send an error report to the developer, mentioning "you're experiencing the same issue highlighted in the devblog."

I'm almost glad there's no first-person knocking animation in Early Access survival crafting game Rust if there were, I'd be sick of watching it by now and my virtual knuckles would be bloody and full of splinters. I've been knocking on player forts all night, dozens of them, in an attempt to go trick-or-treating for Halloween. It's not going well.

It began well, though! The admin for the Rusty Moose servers was kind enough to help me with a request: a way to spawn with a mask. Cognizant of the fact that I might die repeatedly, I didn't want to have to do any harvesting or crafting for my costume, so she was nice enough to place a few shacks around the servers, link me to the sleeping bags within, and fill a crate inside the shack with pumpkins. This meant I could spawn in the shacks, put a pumpkin on my head, and get right to work. Sure, I was completely naked otherwise, but a costume is a costume.

Time for trick-or-treating! Dressed as a nude man with a pumpkin on his head and nothing else on his anything, I leave the shack and head for the nearest visible fort, making almost fifteen feet before I encounter another player. This is a popular server without about 150 people on it, and not all of them ask questions first and open fire later.

I'm dropped so quickly I almost don't realize what has happened, though luckily I got a replay the next time I spawn. And the next. And the next. At least I can see the inside of my mask each time I'm killed, which makes the adventure a bit more festive.

I pick a different shack to spawn in, and finally get the chance to actually knock on a few doors. There's no answer on any of them, but all this running around lets me admire and critique some player forts. A common design theme seems to be It's A Big Box, but I also see a few It's A Small Box, several It's a Box With Another Box On Top, and more than one It's Part of a Box.

Also, in keeping with election season: It's A Wall.

At any rate, the amount of forts is impressive. The server was completely wiped not long ago, and I was a little worried there wouldn't be any forts at all. I was wrong: there are tons of them. Rust players certainly know how to build. They also know how to shoot you, stab you, and bludgeon you. It's a multi-talented community.

I knock on some more doors, but no one answers. I run into a player, the first I've encountered who doesn't actually murder me, and we chat for a moment. A few minutes later another goes hopping by, his dong flapping in the breeze. Gunfire echoes in a nearby valley. I see a deer and a horse and a boar. I knock on more doors, even yelling "Trick-or-treat!" a few times. Still, no one answers.

I run and knock on more doors. It begins to rain. A bald naked woman assaults me with an unlit torch, and chases me for a while before giving up. The complete lack of treats I've received means I'm beginning to starve, and soon, I'm dying from lack of food. Two heavily armed players run by, and one helpfully saves me from starvation by shooting me in the face.

I hop onto the other Rusty Moose server hoping to find less bloodshed and more snacks. I visit more forts, including one that looks like two Box forts climbed into a teleporter together and were spliced together to form a BrundleBox. I see a few wooden skyscrapers, at least one Octagon, and a homeless shelter (I presume for players who haven't built their own Boxes yet.) Still, no one is answering when I knock or yell "Trick-or-treat!"

I'm living longer there aren't as many hostiles here but that just means I begin starving again. At one point, I eat my pumpkin mask just to stay alive, but running around without it means I'm not a trick-or-treater, I'm just a naked idiot. I leap from a tall structure to kill myself, but wind up just severely wounding myself, and after I writhe around screaming for a while, I respawn, put on another pumpkin, and head out for one last pass.

After a long night of running around with a torch knocking on another few dozen empty forts, I see a wonderful sight. It's a fort, and someone's home: I can see a figure on the roof, outlined against the sky. Excitedly, I rush up to the door and knock. There's no answer. I peer up at the roof, then knock again. Still nothing. I look up at the roof again, just in time to see the fort's owner jumping off it to the ground, where he beats me to death with a rock.

Before he finishes me off, I hear him munching on something. In a night spent trick-or-treating in Rust, it's the closest I ever get to a treat. Happy Halloween.

I woke up naked on an empty beach, with nothing but a rock in my hands and an unlit torch. Before I d even had a chance to stand up, someone had bashed my head in. Just before my assailant finished me off, two naked people approached, killed my attacker and stood staring at me. While I waited for them to attack me too they looked down, dropped a rock at my feet, and ran away into the distance. My first minute of Rust was violent, brutal and oddly human.

You ve probably heard of Rust as the game that people were outraged about as it randomly assigns the gender, race and sizing of your character. This online multiplayer survival game has built a huge following and has developed wonderfully bizarre communities. I ve heard stories of warring factions who meet in a neutral ground ruled by a character who roleplays as the Swedish Chef from The Muppets, and people who wake up only to find themselves in a prison built by another player. It s like a social experiment with added nudity.

As with most survival games the formula of gather, build, die, repeat is found here. The difference that you start stark naked with only a rock creates an added vulnerability, and a feeling that you're trapped in the embryonic stages of technology. Resource gathering of course involves a lot of hitting trees and rocks and wandering about in search of food and materials. Unlike many of its contemporaries Rust's tree-chopping and rock-bashing has a sense of weight. This is a welcome change to the plethora of Minecraft-meets-DayZ clones on Steam, where gathering involves little more than pawing at various objects.

By gathering resources, crafting objects and killing either your fellow humans or wild animals you gain experience points which can be spent on new items to craft. Eventually you ll advance from the Stone Age to automatic rifles. Progress is slow but satisfying. However, once you die you can wave goodbye to your inventory and progress. Unless you ve managed to build a storage, ideally behind locked doors and defences, your stash is either lost with you or looted by your fellow players. Death can come quickly from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, falling, radiation or being attacked and it s surprisingly brutal when it happens. Your character screams and writhes in pain in prolonged death throes.

While playing I have met almost just as many friendly players as those intent on murdering me, which can feel like a rarity in online survival games. While there s no singleplayer mode, there is still plenty of opportunity to focus on your own survival and settlement building. Of course there are still battle royale deathmatch servers if you fancy a spot of human-hunting. The lack of lumbering zombies (often a mainstay of survival games), puts the focus on human interaction and all the potential for friendship/betrayal that entails. Do you run and hide, or risk exposing yourself in the hope that other players will help you out?

There s an eeriness to Rust's world. Sprinkled throughout the green and often pretty environment there s abandoned industrial buildings that house valuable materials. From time to time an airplane will fly overhead and drop supply crates. These crates become a focus point leading to interactions between players that often end in death.

The mysterious planes and dilapidated buildings made me reflect on the chaos happening around and how bizarre the whole thing must look from above. Rust doesn't take itself too seriously. Before too long my character was running about the place with mismatching wellington boots and a pumpkin on his head. Thanks to a pleasant environment design and little humorous touches (like the pumpkin) Rust doesn t suffer from the brown overbearing barrenness that some other survival games do.

The environment isn t perfect however. I have seen quite a few trees, rocks and dead bodies floating in mid-air, and textures pop in and out as you run about. Slow progression can be frustrating as you can find yourself starting again from scratch regularly. Early levelling up follows a similar line each time so you ll be repeating yourself a lot in the early stages of character growth.

Fortunately the developer of Rust, Facepunch Studios, is regularly patching and updating the game. There are weekly developer blogs on the website that outline updates as well as what the team are currently working on. There are also regular blogs to keep players up to date on the rest off the very active Rust community. It feels like an actively growing product, rather than an unfinished game that the developer occasionally patches. For that reason, and the solid amount of interesting features already currently available in its alpha state it s one of the most fascinating online survival games available.

Disclosure: Facepunch writer Craig Pearson used to write for PCG up until about five years ago.

As far as Early Access survival games go, Rust is among the most loved. Although Garry Newman isn't currently working on the project, Facepunch continues to chip away at it under the supervision of lead developer Maurino Berry. One of Berry's recent additions was XP, which introduced a little bit of structure (ie, the permanent short term goal of grinding). Although the system was welcomed pre-launch, it appears to be conflicting with the studio's and the fanbase's longterm vision for the game.

As spotted by PCGamesN, Berry wrote on reddit recently that, in the future, Rust would not have XP at all. Fans on reddit and in the game's Steam review section have been vocal about how the system doesn't quite work, and Berry has recently offered his own thoughts. Basically, the system appears to mute the chaos that arises from Rust's previously more freeform and less quantitative sense of progress.

"As I ve said before, the XP system had huge praise until it was released, and then lots of people hated it," Berry wrote in August. "I m not deaf nor blind to this, and I m leaning towards the whole thing needing a rethink.

"In some ways the XP system is the antithesis of what Rust was all about: it forces players to do things in a certain order and takes away from the sandbox feeling of the game. We added this because people were bitching about how grindy hitting barrels and hoping for blueprints was, but I neglected to realize that the randomness could actually lead to some interesting situations and forced you to work with what you had."

Berry's suggestion that XP will be removed entirely seems a little informal, and the studio might opt to revamp it instead, but the fact that it's a concern is good news for anyone whose recent falling out with the game is a result of the grind.

The latest Humble Bundle is all about surviving, which means if you're keen on strategy, resource management and harvesting lots of... stuff, then it may pique your interest. The base level games, available on a pay-what-you-want basis, include sci-fi turned based strategy Tharsis, Early Access fantasy survival game Savage Lands, and the narrative-driven post-apocalypse of Kholat.

While that's a lot to love there for some players, the next tier is arguably the real boon. If you pay more than the average donation (which is currently $5.11) you'll get Rust, Space Engineers and Shelter 2. In my humble opinion, $5.11 for Rust alone is a pretty good steal.

The deal is over here, and elapses in a bit less than two weeks, so... no huge rush, I guess.