Video Game / Realm Royale

Choose a class. Forge your legend.

A Battle Royale Game created by Hi-Rez Studios, the creators of SMITE and Paladins. Set in a High Fantasy world similar and possibly even the same as Paladins, Realm Royale airdrops one hundred players onto a large deserted island with naught but a cheap knife and a summonable mount to their names. They'll have to contend with each other as they loot chests and forge new weapons and abilities, all while a deadly fog rolls in, forcing them into ever-tighter confines.

Realm stands out from its contemporaries with a number of unique mechanics. Firstly, players can choose from four classes - Warrior, Mage, Assassin, and Hunter - which give a number of passive bonuses and lean towards a particular playstyle. Secondly, all players have active abilities (similar to the Hero Shooter that the game was based on) as well as slots for new passive abilities, all of which can be looted and swapped out as players prefer. Lastly is the forging system - unwanted weapons and abilities can be disenchanted for shards, which can then be used to create new, more powerful weapons and abilities at one of the many forges scattered around the map.

Players can queue for matches as teams of four, teams of two, or by themselves.

Originally, the game received its last update on February 4th, 2020, though the game remained online and could be played at any time.^* The game's small userbase of ~1500 players on Steam at the time probably had something to do with it.

Surprisingly, the game eventually saw a comeback in the form of Realm Royale Reforged, bringing new developers and a handful of changes to the game, such as bringing back class locked items and a number of balance changes. While this did briefly reignite interest in the game, player numbers quickly fell back down to its usual numbers from before (~1000 players at peak per day). However, the game does continue to receive new updates, at least for the time being.

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Tropes regarding Realm Royale are:

• Advancing Wall of Doom: The Fog, which damages any player caught in it.
• An Adventurer Is You: Realm Royale has five classes with class-specific weapons and abilities. They are Warrior, Engineer, Assassin, Mage, and Hunter.
• Automatic Crossbows: The crossbow can fire eight shots in fairly rapid succession, dealing considerable damage with decent aim. However, it has lower base damage than the similar arbalest, and suffers from damage falloff, making it more of a midrange ambush weapon.
• A Winner Is You: Killing your way through an island full of similarly-homicidal lunatics will earn you a simple congratulatory message.
• Back from the Dead: In team games, dead teammates who haven't already returned to the lobby can be brought back to life by forging a Resurrection Scroll. This takes considerable time and a lot of shards, with the dead player(s) being revived as chickens (potentially getting killed again if they're not careful), but it can also possibly turn the game around if a shard-rich teammate escapes to a forge.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Armor is essentially a second health bar, and will be depleted first when taking damage.
• Catapult to Glory: The island has several catapults that players can use to launch themselves over great distances - useful for quickly getting away from the fog, assaulting a position from a new angle, or saving yourself the ride to the next town.
• Cherry Tapping: Killing an enemy with your starting dagger takes effort, especially since it's permanently replaced the minute you pick up a real weapon. Killing an enemy as a chicken is also quite difficult.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Both weapons and abilities come in tiers - rarer weapons deal more damage, and rarer abilities are more effective and have shorter cooldowns. The tiers are common^note white, rare^note green, epic^note purple, and legendary^note gold.
• Cool Horse: There's a number of different mounts you can purchase or unlock, which you can call to your side almost instantly.
• Cool Sword: Longswords swing in a wide arc and can deal large amounts of damage very quickly - unfortunately, you'll be outranged most fights, on account the fact that most players have guns.
• Damage Over Time: Fire-enchanted weapons will deal a small amount of damage over time with every hit.
• Deflector Shields: Players can generate these for short periods with Shielding Shout and Shielding Potion, taking set amounts of damage before breaking. There are also unlockable passives for different classes that grant shields after using certain abilities.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Throwing axes take out huge chunks of health and armor on impact, have no damage falloff at range, can be thrown around corners with careful timing, and don't need to be reloaded. However, they "fire" slowly, can't travel very far, and accounting for the timing of the throws and the distance to the target is a lot harder than just shooting someone.
• Elemental Weapon: Legendary weapons often have an associated element - fire, ice, or lightning, each of which have their own special effects^note Fire deals burn damage, ice slows enemies, lightning reveals enemies through walls.
• Fantasy Character Classes:
  • Warriors are strongest in close-range combat, specializing in longswords, heavy hammers, and throwing axes, and have a variety of healing and protection abilities that give them considerable sustainability.
  • Assassins are skilled in attacking from ambush, get bonuses with shredders, heirloom rifles, and sniper rifles, and their abilities allow them to obscure their position or make themselves harder to track.
  • Hunters are long-range experts, are most effective with bows, crossbows, and arbalests, and their abilities are based on hunting down enemies, dodging their attacks, and catching them off-guard with traps or blast arrows.
  • Mages are most capable in mid-range, are skilled with magic staves of all kinds, and their abilities are a hodgepodge of defensive and and supportive magics paired with some of the best mobility skills in the game
• Forced Transformation: Taking lethal damage will turn you into a chicken (or some other useless form), during which you can't use any of your abilities or weapons, and you can only defend yourself with a couple of extremely weak melee attacks. If you manage to survive for twenty seconds, you'll return to normal (albeit at half health) - however, you can only become a chicken so many times before the next lethal hit kills you outright, and being killed as a chicken is an immediate Game Over.
• Freemium: The game is free to play, but most cosmetics require crowns (the in-game premium currency) - and while you can get crowns as login bonuses, it takes a long time to build up a decent amount of them, while the shop items change frequently enough that you'll likely miss an item you want if you haven't been saving up. Prior to 2020, there were battle passes which gave rewards the more you played; if you pay to unlock the pass, you got rewards every tier (including more crowns), but otherwise, you only got rewards every so often. There are special item bundles that can only be paid for with real money.
• Gatling Good: The Gatekeeper is a man-portable minigun, found only in airdropped gold chests and by killing loot goblins. Though it takes a second to spin up and you can't move very quickly while firing, it can chew through enemies very quickly.
• Grenade Launcher: The plasma launcher fires small canisters of energy that explode on impact, dealing splash damage in a small radius.
• Ground-Shattering Landing: The inhabitants of the Realm Royale world apparently think parachutes are for pansies, so every skydive (or suitably long fall) ends with your character smashing into the ground, complete with a superhero landing.
• Harmless Freezing: The Ice Block ability encases you in ice, making you immune to damage and recovering a small amount of health, though you can't move or attack. Mages can upgrade it to provide a shield after thawing.
• Healing Potion: Your main source of recovering health.
• In a Single Bound: The Heroic Leap ability, which allows you to jump a considerable distance. Warriors can upgrade the ability either to create a shield bubble or gain the benefit of dealing damage to enemies on impact.
• Invisibility: Several abilities (particularly those of the assassin) can turn you invisible, aiding you in an escape or ambush.
• Magic Staff: In three flavors - ice, stone, and bolt.
• Molotov Cocktail: The Fire Bomb ability, which creates a patch of fire that damages any enemy standing in it.
• More Dakka: SMG's provide a high rate of fire, at the cost of the spray making it inaccurate at range. Assault rifles fire slightly slower, but have better accuracy due to their tighter spray. The much-rarer LMG is slower still, but more than makes up for it with solid base damage, good accuracy, and a high-cap magazine to ensure it keeps shooting for as long as it needs to. But for sheer volume of bullets, you can't beat the Gatekeeper. Honorable mention goes to the burst rifle, which fires three rounds with every pull of the trigger.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: Pretty much everything except the player models are directly lifted from Paladins, even the island itself was part of Paladins' "Battlegrounds" game mode (which was the precursor to this game).
• Piñata Enemy: If you hear high-pitched giggling or taunting, that means there's an invisible loot goblin hiding nearby. If you follow the voice to its source, the goblin will reveal itself, and quickly run away. Shooting the goblin causes it to drop shards, and killing it causes it to drop a pile of high-quality items - however, the goblin has a lot of health, runs faster than you can on foot, and the gunfire will probably attract the attention of nearby players.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Five-round revolvers are one of the basic weapon types. They have fairly high damage per shot, but suffer from extreme damage falloff at long range, making them more suited to close-quarters fights.
• Short-Range Shotgun: At a distance, the shotgun probably won't even deal enough damage to knock someone off their horse. Up close, however, it's vicious.
• Sky Pirate: You're carried to the island on an airship piloted by a rather jaunty-looking fellow dressed like a buccaneer.
• Sniper Rifle: It's the only weapon with an actual scope, and can deal absurd amounts of damage from very far away, especially with a headshot. However, it has to be reloaded after every shot, so missing a nearby enemy will usually go poorly for you.
• Super Window Jump: In Realm Royale, windows are just big enough for a chicken to jump through; giving chickened players a chance to escape from human players who have to search for another route.
• Three-Point Landing: Instead of using parachutes like most battle royale games, Realm Royale lets players dive right to the ground, pulling off a superhero landing.