After seeing Path of Exile's battle royale April Fools' joke, I was left wondering why studios aren't experimenting with the classic battle royale formula in other genres. After all, the concept is fairly simple. All you need is a bunch of people, some solid moment-to-moment gameplay, a decently lengthy stretch of land, and plenty of reasons to go and find other players in order to hit them over the head until they explore into a shower of medpacks and resources. As long as the basic combat mechanics are good, there is no reason why the battle royale formula couldn't work on anything from platformers to moba-like games.

With that in mind, I am rather glad to announce that Stunlock Studios are working on a battle royale game mode for their "action-packed arena brawler" Battlerite. While the details are still in short supply, you can expect to see a map that's about 30 times larger than the usual arena, 20 people in each match, as well as the ability to play in teams of two or solo. As for the matches themselves, Stunlock Studios are trying to make them about 10 minutes long so there's never too much waiting in between all of the action.

As expected, you'll still be able to choose your champion and control them from the same perspective as you would in the normal PvP mode. Where things diverge quite heavily, however, is in the fact that the new battle royale mode will have items! I'm afraid I have no actual examples of these items on hand, but I can only assume they'll be your standard RPG fare: damage boosts, health boosts, protection items, and so forth.

This might not sound like much, but for a game as tightly tuned as Battlerite, the presence of potentially stat-changing items is going to bring about a whole bunch of interesting situations given how the line between support and DPS champions is going to blur. Whether any of this is going to be even remotely balanced still remains to be seen, but at least it's an interesting take on your usual battle royale formula.

Once more information gets revealed I'll make sure to cover it, but until then I'm afraid all we can do is sit and wait for Stunlock to finally do an official reveal.