Battle royales and the culture that surround them have collected a litany of archetypes, creating a sort of BR zodiac that can help you understand the machinations of the people you encounter in Warzone, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or PUBG. Maybe you feel like one or more of these stereotypes sorta kinda speak to you, whether it’s the greedy little Loot Goblin or the incessant Spammer, or maybe you’re surprised to find one that fits you perfectly, like a video game version of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Or maybe you feel like none of these fit you, but definitely describe the guy you played a few rounds with last night, or the friend you had to stop teaming up with because they were getting just a wee bit too toxic.
Whatever the case, you’ll want to check out our collection of battle royale archetypes. Peruse our pages and see if you can find echoes of your personality, or your best friend’s, perhaps even your partner’s. If you feel like something’s missing, tell us, we’d love to know.
The Loot Goblin
Battle royales drop you into sprawling warzones with very little tools to keep you alive — you need to find the best tools, and Loot Goblins will do it faster than anyone else. Like Sonic sprinting to collect coins, these guys will make a beeline for loot crates and snatch every single item in it, whether they work together or not. They seem to always make it onto the map a full 30 seconds before anyone else loads in. I encounter the worst of these greedy bastards in Apex Legends, where loot crates often have a disparate array of weapons, ammo, and attachments that require you to seek out their counterparts. Loot goblins take it all, however, snatching up every sight, stock, and health pack in sight like they’ll be able to beat someone over the head with a med kit.
These people do not care if you are left empty-handed, standing in an open field with enemy squads landing around you. They will simply gather every shiny object like a magpie and run away, leaving you to fend for yourself. Much, much later, they might ping something they oh-so-charitably dropped for the inventory space.
The Hot Mic
Gone are the days of Microsoft’s generosity, when you’d get a chintzy little headset with your Xbox 360 purchase so you could rage against Halo 3 players without having to shell out any extra cash. Nowadays, you’ll need to buy a headset if you want 3D spatial audio and the freedom to shout instructions at your teammates like a virtual drill sergeant — and the quality of those headsets range dramatically from a chic set of cups you’d see on the heads of esports squads to a piece of plastic that evokes the same flimsy, echo-y cheapness you once got for free.
Though games like Apex Legends revolutionised mic-less communication with its ping system, there are still many players who prefer to use a microphone to communicate. That usually means, however, that you’ll end up with at least one or two squadmates a sesh who have what I like to call “dooky mics.”
I’m talking the kind of mic that picks up the background noises of their home (barking dogs, crying kids, the deep, thumping bumps of Pop Smoke), and they’re probably blasting the game’s sound through their fucking TV, which we can hear with more clarity than their voice. If they ping something and their character says something about it, you can bet your arse you’ll hear their character say it again as it emanates from their television.
This mic, though it struggles to pick up anything said below a shout. Actually, it seems only capable of greedily snagging their S, T, and P words, loves to pick up the sound of their breath rattling in their chest cavity as they try and take down an enemy player. Their mic is so bad, so distractingly dismal, that you have to apologise profusely before muting them.
The Solo Dolo
This dude is joining quads matches and playing like he’s in solos. He’s a lone wolf, a mercenary, a battle royale John Wick. Sure, he could just switch over and queue for solo matches, but he wants you to see how good he is at this, he doesn’t need your fucking help. He’s running, Leeroy Jenkins-ing into the fray with only his fists and a prayer, and when he gets downed it will be, inevitably, your fault.
Sometimes the Solo Dolo is a blessing — a player so good, so unwavering, that they can help your team coast to a victory without technically helping you out at all. Like Michael Jordan leading the Chicago Bulls to the NBA Championship in 1993, he’ll put the entire team on his back and carry you to the top spot. Sometimes (most of the time) he’s just likes to rush in alone and die.
The Spammer
Battle royales offer tons of ways for players to show off their personalities (or the size of their wallets), from special skins and weapon charms to voice lines and emotes. Unfortunately, like any other tool given to gamers, we have found a way to abuse them. Couple voice lines and emotes with extensive ping systems like the one in Apex Legends and you’ve got the recipe for the perfect chaos buffet. It is at this buffet you will find The Spammer, gorging themselves on a smorgasbord of sounds.
Listen, we love pings here. Pings let players communicate if they don’t have a mic or don’t feel comfortable talking into one. Pings offer more accessibility options when it comes to communicating important information in a battle royale: where enemies are, the location of good loot, the planned path to tread.
But the ping wheel and the voice line/emote wheels are clearly too enticing for some gamers, and they’ll relentlessly spam them in matches — in some cases to such an extent that games like Apex Legends have had to change characters’ voice lines because spamming them resulted in some NSFW sounds. While other FPS titles like Overwatch 2 limit how often you can spam “I need healing,” that’s not the case for many battle royale games. The sound a downed player makes when relentlessly pinging the floor at their feet haunts me long after I rage quit and shut off my console.
The Smurf
This person got so good at the game that they lost interest in the climb, they grew weary of close, hard-fought matches with their peers and decided they wanted to slum it with some plebeian, get some easy wins without breaking a sweat. These people are smurfs. They either make alt accounts to help boost their friends’ ranks or they do it just to be arseholes, to stomp less proficient players to satisfy some weird kink. These guys need another hobby.
The Camper
This person stakes out the centre of the ever-closing BR ring and heads to it right out of the gate, determined to get comfy like the people who wait outside of 30 Rock for Saturday Night Live tickets when Harry Styles is both the host and the musical guest. But unlike the very nice alphabet army members wrapped in duvets sitting on beach chairs and sharing cocktails out of hand-carved flasks, these campers are meanies. They know exactly where to get the best sniper rifle in the game to go along with their bird’s eye perch, and they’re going to sit there and take potshots at anyone running around at ground level. You are mere ants to them.
These guys love to make you angry, to mentally terrorize you until you’ve run out of hope, to make you think there’s no point in trying to move between cover or huck grenades at their hideout or sneak up behind them, because they’ve got their sights trained on you and a claymore waiting with your name on it. No matter what you do, they’ll take you out faster than you can say “fuck that camper.”
The Heated Gamer
You know this person in real life, too, and you’d love to know where they were on January 6th. The Heated Gamer is almost always a cis-man, almost always white, and almost always hurling racial epithets around as though he gets paid by the slur. You cannot redeem this guy. This guy needs therapy. He needs a long, hard look in the mirror, at his relationship to his parents, at his search history. He should be banned from playing online for a solid year, and maybe he’s one of the 350,000 players who were banned from Call of Duty back in 2021 for being racist jerks. But just like genital herpes, he always comes back, oozing hatred like a weeping sore. Fuck this guy.
The Child
Do you have to ask permission to buy Fortnite’s V-bucks? Do your devices require a pin code to access certain content? Do you, upon dying, whine in a manner that is only ever echoed on the playground when someone takes your ball? If so, you might be The Child, or just a child in general.
If you’re not, you know this kid. You’ll likely encounter them in the safe, colourful confines of Fortnite’s world, griddying in the pre-game lobby and telling you about it over and over again. Their piercing shrieks when they die and pathetic pleas for help are a special form of birth control, a reminder that today’s generation of children have enough technical knowledge to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you in competitive games but will make sure you’re absolutely miserable while they do it.
In the rare chance that a child is sweet, protect them at all costs. They can’t help it that their parents silently hand them V-bucks gift cards for their birthdays before putting their ear plugs back in and returning to their own games.
The Lagger
First they’re ahead of you, steaming forward with reckless abandon towards a hotly contested point. Then, in a flash, they’re by your side, aimlessly sideways-walking into some foliage. Their mic is cutting in and out, their character oscillating between idle and active, every single shot they take is miles off target. Unless, of course, the lagger is murdering everyone because nobody else can shoot them. They might get disconnected just to join back and do it all over again, an endless cycle of shuddering, staggering movement and shorthanded play. This is the Lagger, and it’s not their fault, you guys.
The Jarhead
Maybe they’re currently enrolled in ROTC after they were targeted at their high school job fair, maybe they’re actively deployed, or maybe they just really love the military industrial complex — either way, the Jarhead is the kind of battle royale player who only ever uses lingo typically reserved for Michael Bay movies. He’s calling out points by their NATO phonetic alphabet designations, he’s referring to enemies as “tangos,” he’s informing you that he’s “switching mags” when he’s out of bullets.
Though you’ll most likely find this guy LARP-ing as a Marine in Warzone 2.0 or PUBG, don’t be surprised if you hear some Jarhead jargon in any competitive battle royale. This is what these guys live for.
The Woman
She’s just trying to play in peace, guys, please stop inviting her to your party chat or calling her names or asking if she has an Instagram.
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