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Retix Battle Royale

Fifty players, one map, no respawns and no match timer. What ends it is the ring: eight phases that close the last circle 409 seconds in and burn 45 health a second on anyone still outside.

The ring, phase by phase

The opening circle has a 19,300-pixel radius, which covers the whole 27,200-pixel map. The half-diagonal is 19,233, so nothing is outside it at the start. From there it closes eight times.

Add it up and the last ring closes at 409 seconds, just under seven minutes. Every phase is shorter than the one before it in both halves, so the game accelerates instead of dragging. The first phase gives you 110 seconds to react and the last gives you 24.

The damage curve accelerates harder than the clock does. Being caught outside phase one costs 3 health a second, survivable for over half a minute at full health. Being caught outside phase eight costs 45 a second, which kills a Trooper in under three seconds and a Marksman in under two.

Early ring damage is a tax. Late ring damage is a death sentence.

Why the first circle stops at 10,500

The first shrink leaves the safe area at about 46% of the map instead of a third of it, and that number is picked rather than derived. Each phase is checked against a worst case: a player standing on the far edge has to cover twice the difference between the old and new radius, and the wait plus the shrink has to give them enough time to walk it.

The ring centre can drift by up to 3,100 pixels between phases. Enough variety that no two matches funnel to the same place, never enough to put the new circle somewhere unreachable from the old one.

You land with nothing

There is no starting weapon in Battle Royale. Everything comes off the ground, so the pickup and drop controls exist in this mode and nowhere else: F to take the gun you are standing on, X to throw away the one in your hands, or the context and drop buttons on touch.

The first minute is a footrace to a loot pile, and bare hands are the weapon you fight with if you lose it. A punch has real reach and a real cooldown, and in the opening seconds it is frequently the only option either player has.

294 loot zones in three tiers

Frontier carries 294 loot zones, and they are not uniform. Twenty-one are hot, 124 are standard and 149 are cold, so about half the map's loot points are the sparse kind and only seven percent are the contested kind.

A zone is a list of item kinds plus a scatter of points to place them at. A standard zone deals out weapons, ammunition, health and a backpack across roughly two dozen positions; a cold zone runs a shorter list across fewer.

Landing hot is a genuine gamble and not a formality, because twenty-one zones cannot serve fifty players and everyone else can read the map too.

There are no fixed item spawns anywhere on Frontier. The thirteen that every arena map carries do not exist here, so healing is a loot decision competing with weapons and ammunition for the space you can carry.

That changes what the opening minute is for. On an arena map you know where the health is before the match starts. On Frontier the first pile you open decides whether you are fighting with a Railgun or with your fists, and the ring gives you 110 seconds before it starts asking questions.

Solo, duo and squad

The same fifty-player map runs three ways. In solo, every player is their own unit. In duo, two players share a fate and the pair is only out when both are down. In squad, four players share it.

The win condition is written against the unit and not the player: the last unit standing wins, so in a squad mode the unit is the squad. A single survivor of a four-player squad is still a live squad.

Two hundred spawn points

Frontier carries 200 spawn positions for a maximum of 50 players, so which part of the map you start on genuinely varies match to match. Combined with a ring centre that drifts up to 3,100 pixels, the same opening route rarely works twice.

What a win pays

Placement itself pays nothing. What pays is how many human players were eliminated before you, at three gold each, so winning a full fifty-player lobby is 147 gold from outlasting alone, plus 40 for finishing and 60 for the win, plus whatever your kills and headshots were worth.

That lands a battle royale on roughly the same gold-per-minute as a four-minute team win despite taking two or three times as long.

It also explains why a lobby stuffed with bots pays badly: bots are not humans outlasted, and they are not counted.

Second place in a lobby of fifty real players pays 144 gold from outlasting, three short of the winner. The mode pays for surviving, not for the kill that ends it.