Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is a completely silly battle royale game. Inspired by the Japanese game show Takashi’s Castle, the game pits 60 players against one another in a series of game show-like challenges until only one champion remains.
Despite the hilarity of the obstacles, there's a natural competitive aspect to the game as players vie for the crown. This has sparked questions as to whether or not Fall Guys should implement some sort of ranked play for those who are more competitive. While it would seem to make sense to separate the casuals from the hardcore players, Mediatonic apparently has no plans to implement a ranked system.
Fall Guys lead game designer Joe Walsh was asked about the prospect of ranked play and he acknowledged that the team has thought about it, it's ultimately not the right fit for the game at this point in time. Speaking to App Trigger, Walsh compared Fall Guys to other competitive games like Rocket League and League of Legends, explaining that Mediatonic's game does not design or balance its game for the top players.
Yeah, I mean it’s something that we’ve thought about but if you’re going to do ranked in your game than you need to have your game designed for this peak level of competition. Like, if you look at games like Rocket League and League of Legends and Starcraft and stuff like that, they design the game for the top 0.1% of players so that the game is perfectly balanced, perfectly fair, and that’s not what Fall Guys is about.
He explained that game show-like nature of Fall Guys means there's an element of randomness, sometimes bad luck, that players can't control. This probably wouldn't lend itself well to competitive play.
Like, it doesn’t really lend itself to hardcore competition. If people want to play it that way and track their own win loss ratio, than absolutely go for it. We are fully behind them but right now we need to be really focused on what features we pick to develop and to nurture a game that we think the most, like, the largest percentage of the community want and so at least, for now, super hardcore ranked is not the direction we think we’re going to take Fall Guys in.
Fall Guys is only a month old, having released on PlayStation 4 and PC in August. It was free through PlayStation Plus on PS4 where it became the most downloaded PS Plus game of all time. Mediatonic hasn't announced if it will come to Xbox One or Nintendo Switch. In the meantime, Season 2 of the game was recently revealed and will have a medieval theme.