Take a second to digest that title.
NetEase has unveiled ECC: REDLINE, an all-new tactical battle royale (marketed as a ‘tactical survival tournament’) with a competitive focus from the get-go that fuses traditional first-person combat with *checks notes* extreme sports.
It’s literally dubbed an ‘extreme-sports competitive shooter, new-generation tactical survival tournament’. You develop athletes and lead them toward an ambitious championship trophy while exploring an arena, looting, and surviving an ever-shrinking circle in a game that absolutely smacks of Call of Duty: Warzone.
ECC: REDLINE Wants Competition Out of The Box
ECC: REDLINE is an all-new first-person shooter from NetEase, built around something called the Extreme Circuit Championship. It’s a game that fuses traditional arcade shooter mechanics, like those found in Call of Duty, with extreme sports, like those found in… I don’t know, Steep?
In the earliest marketing materials for the game, including gameplay sequences, trailers, and some screenshots, absolutely every inch of the thing is deeply reminiscent of Warzone, Activision’s 2020 battle royale game.
I’m talking about the accolade pop-ups, the animations, the UI, the map, the visuals…
Like, when you break someone’s shields, you get a little purple ‘shield crack’ icon come up. When you parachute into the map, the points of interest are titled over the ground beneath you, and they fade as you fly towards them; when you do certain things that warrant an accolade, a little badge pops up in the centre of your screen…
The reload animations, weapon examination, tactical sprint, even the visual palette and how the trailers are presented… It’s all an absolute like-for-like copy of Call of Duty Warzone.
But the key difference here is that it’s not just a battle royale. It’s ECC: REDLINE, after all, and it’s built with competitive gaming in mind. NetEase wants this to be an esports title right off the bat, it seems. To accommodate that, there are extreme sports mechanics built into the platform.
On the game’s Steam page, it was written:
No warm-up, no waiting. The moment your athlete enters the arena, the fight is already on. Loot supplies, contest key positions, upgrade your gear, and push with your squad as the safe zone closes in. Here, extreme sports and tactical survival collide, turning every round into a rush worth running back.
There’s a mode called ‘Extreme Battlefield‘ that encourages immense levels of traversal with grapple hooks, ziplines, and acrobatic maneuvers… If our formatting allowed for cry-laugh emojis, I’d be spamming them right now.
Here’s the gameplay trailer:
It’s kind of bizarre how this managed to surface, and I can see it emerging as a free-to-play shooter that lasts all of about two weeks on the open market before it dwindles into nothing.
Somebody should probably tell NetEase it’s not really possible to create a game with esports in mind. It doesn’t work like that, and the industry doesn’t accommodate a ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ mentality.
Do you think you’ll play ECC: REDLINE? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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