Knockout City Doesn’t Show Your Overall Stats, Which Is A Bummer

Image: Velan Studios / EA

Last week Kotaku’s Zack Zweizen and I teamed up for a few sets of City KO. I played pretty well. Zack, on the other hand, crushed him, even ending a game with a jaw-dropping 15 KD positive. Sadly, except for the screenshots we both took in shock after the fact, there’s no way to tangibly commemorate the bragging rights in Knockout City. The game does not currently offer a permanent way to track your stats.

Knockout City, a surprisingly fun A multiplayer dodge ball game, released late last month for PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch. Since its launch, the game has quickly and unexpectedly picked up the pace, topped over five million players nowadays. Part of this soaring popularity is due to the way it was published (varying degrees of “free”). But it’s also undoubtedly the result of the premise of the game, which is fundamentally simpler than a basic addition: toss chaser balloons at your opponents. Dodge the hunter bullets they throw at you. Two hits and you’re out. The first to a defined score wins the round. The rounds are happening at a breakneck pace, and the game certainly captures that “Okay, just one more game” mentality.

After each match, you can view a list of post-match stats. A scoreboard will show your knockouts, assists, “kills” etc., coupled with a neat little ratio that can instantly show how well or how bad you played in the previous game – you know, like basically any competitor multiplayer game. But, once you get into the next game, those stats are gone, poof, shipped to the internet farm in the upstate where the data is going to take a few vacation.

This is, all things considered, a fairly minor gripe, but the lack of full statistics tracking remains somewhat disappointing. I don’t think I’m the only one to say that I really enjoy looking at my performance, good or bad, in multiplayer games.

It’s fascinating to see, in hard numbers, a big picture of how you’ve played at a macro level, and use that data to potentially point to how you can hone your craft. There’s a motivator too: When you compare how you played in your 100th game to how you played in your tenth, you can usually chart a direct improvement. Keep playing, and who knows, you’ll probably see another improvement in your 150th, or 200th, and so on. Over the years, I may have burned more hours on Halo Waypoint than on any Halo game individually. (Unique exception: Halo 3. And maybe Halo: Reach too.)

I’m not the only one wondering why this multiplayer game doesn’t currently offer stats tracking. (Your ranking in League Play, Knockout’s competitive mode, offers an indication of how well or poorly you’re playing, but nothing quite close to the detailed stats you can find in other multiplayer games.) Over the past few weeks , Knockout City players to have taken to the game’s subreddit to clear up the confusion over why this multiplayer doesn’t have such a feature. To this day, the answer remains a “Huh, no idea,” although some Reddit users have pointed out that current game developers tend to add features in response to community requests.

Knockout City isn’t the first hugely popular multiplayer game to launch without extensive stat tracking, either. Apex Legends, the battle royale played at one point or another by literally everyone across the universe, hasn’t had proper stat tracking until its second season, which went live in July 2019, five months after Apex officially released. Knockout City is still in its first season, with 52 days remaining. The developers at Velan Studios have already updated the game significantly since its launch, adding a ranked mode and a new map to the game, along with a host of daily challenges.

It’s unclear whether Velan intends to add a stats tracking component in future updates or seasonal deployments. When contacted for comment by Kotaku, studio representatives had no information to add.