Sixteen teams are engaged in a three-day battle royal from afternoon till evening in Kerala’s Kochi. At the end of the third day on Sunday evening, the winning team will return home with Rs 2 crore.

Welcome to the Battlegrounds Mobile India Pro Series edition of 2024, which is being played out at the Adlux International Convention Centre in Kochi’s Angamaly.

The battle played on handheld mobile devices – playing solo or as a team with a maximum of four members, with room for two substitutes – involves six rounds each day.

Sources by the Correspondent.

“The only similarity that Battleground has with PUBG is the Battle Royal format. This game has been designed and developed specifically for the Indian market,” said Karan Pathak, associate director, Esports - KRAFTON Inc, the company behind the game and the tournament.

“The basic idea is if there are 64 players in the tournament, with four members in each team, then they will have to eliminate the remaining 60 participants. It is a last-man-standing battle,” Pathak said.

The tournament started around a month ago with around 600 participants spread across 128 teams, each playing from either the team’s “boot camp” or their homes. The game involves multiple rounds divided into multiple matches which could stretch to as long as 28 minutes. “Some of the matches are shorter,” Pathak said.

Sources by the Correspondent.

“The more battles one participates in and wins, the higher the rank and more the number of points that the player bags, making them eligible for the tournament,” said Bishnu Divas Das, a Calcutta-based junior doctor and mobile gaming enthusiast.

Das did not participate in the ongoing tourney for lack of time.

There are several maps available to the player when they log in to the game and are dropped off a parachute from an aircraft. The flight path keeps changing across the map in each round and that requires the players to do some quick thinking on when to eject and parachute to the ground.

After each player – playing solo or in a team – lands they have to raid ghost towns, empty buildings and other locations provided in the map to look for weapons, vehicles, armour and any other tools that they need to win the battle.

When the game begins all that each player is provided with is the option of customised clothing. As the game proceeds and the player advances, the quality of the weaponry and armoury improves. Grabbing the gear is not enough for the battlers as the rivals can spook them and loot their gear at any stage of the game.

Even if played on a mobile phone the games get intense as the rounds close in.

Sources by the Correspondent.

The players also have to be alert that they are not caught outside the “safe zone” marked on each map, as the playable area keeps shrinking every few minutes to a random location and a player cannot afford to get caught outside it.

The playable area is marked by a blue wall that contracts the more time a player spends in each zone.

The possibility of encountering rivals on the battlefields increases as the map shrinks. There is danger from above, too. Each player gets an alert signalling the threat of an incoming air bomber. The target surface is marked red so that the players know the exact spot that they have to avoid.

Not just bombs, gifts from the sky are available for each player too, as a plane may fly randomly across the playable map and drop a package containing looted items.

“The players can use flares to acquire different weapons in the game,” said Das. “There are red flares provided by the game and these are random airdrops. While the yellow flares are airdrops that are called by the players during the game.”