Genre: Battle Royale
Publisher: PUBG Corporation
Developer: PUBG Corporation
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: Windows, Xbox1, Android, ioS
Modes: Multiplayer only
It’s been official for a while now, “Battle Royale” is a
new PC and console game genre, just like when League of Legends was
formed from the base mould of Defense of the
Ancients and the term MOBA
was coined, the battle royale genre has just as rich a history. Our tale beings
with the 1999 novel Battle Royale by
Japanese author Koushun
Takami which tells the story of a large class of junior high school
students who are forced to fight each other to the death in a program run by
the authoritarian Japanese government. The novel was made into a film in 2000 and
I must admit, is pretty damn spectacular having seen it myself and would agree
that this is excellent fodder for a game. I suppose you are wondering how this
fits into the gaming world, well there is a game called ARMA 2 which is a
realistic military combat simulator which takes place over some very large
landscapes and islands, you also may have heard that there was a mod created
using the ARMA engine called DayZ,
DayZ took place on a huge island inspired by the Arma landscapes and featured
players trying to survive while being hunted by zombies and other players.
Inspired by this mod and by the Battle Royal film Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene
created DayZ: Battle Royale an
offshoot of the DayZ mod where players would scavenge for weapons and supplies
and would hunt each other down over a large area with a constantly shrinking
safe area. To make a long story short Greene was contact by the Korean
developer Bluehole/Ginno games (now PUBG Corp) who liked his idea and
wanted to turn it into a standalone title, Greene accepted and moved to Korea
to work with them as their creative director and eventually created Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds as
we know it today.
When I first heard of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (or
‘PUBG’ as it’s commonly referred to) and saw the screenshots, it looked like
just a cheap flavour-of-the-month thing that people would play for a bit then
stop just like the hundreds of other multiplayer games that died out eventually
but as more and more of my friends started playing it, I soon thought that this
may not be the case. So after my housemate bought the game and I had a look at
it I decided to get it myself around May 2017 during the early access it indeed
was different from any First Person (or technically third person) shooter I had
played. To start with the whole thing looked unique, back then main menu was in
a destroyed church and you could see your character model and your squadmates
standing there too, in their underwear, yes everyone was in their underwear
when they first started, which was probably why so many players created female
characters. Firstly though I had to create my character and basically all you
could pick from was a fit, attractive male or female, I thought about going
female but decided not to as I wanted to play as it was me playing though that
itself was unrealistic as I’m not quite in as good as shape as my character heh.
So then you click on ready and you’re warped onto an island off the coast of Erangel the first and main map of
PUBG, this is a spawn island where you could run and jump around amongst the
other players and even test weapons that were sitting on the various tables and
around the island, in the lobby the player count usually had to reach 100
before the 60 second countdown appeared before the match start but this wasn’t
always the case if there weren’t enough players. And so once the timer was up
you were all spawned into a moving cargo plane. Interestingly you could change
from first to third person using the V key and wow seeing all us sitting
shoulder-to-shoulder silently was like we were about to be air-dropped into France. The game also ahas a voice chat feature primarily used for communicating with teammates but you can switch it to be heard by everyone if you really want to listen to people mic spam.
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| Onward my leather-clad friends! |
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| Hey guys, what up? (I so miss being able to see this) |
The plane then flew in a straight line in a random direction
across the island and you had the option at any time to jump out with a
parachute and start freefalling. Of course where you decided to head for was
one of the biggest decisions you had to make, the island of Erangel is a
fictional island in the Black sea near the Ukraine which was once occupied by
the Soviet Union (hence the military base) and home to a large populace which
revolted against the Soviet forces and eventually the island was abandoned, and
that’s about as far as the storyline goes, if there was one. So now the island
is used as a huge arena for a ‘battle royale’ with a hundred attractive morbid
thrill-seekers in their underwear. So I decided to avoid any major towns and
touched down in a quiet-out of the way village where I could “loot” in peace.
And yes strewn in buildings and houses all over the island were various types
of weapony, ammo, attachments, medical supplies, backpacks and clothing
including protective gear such as vests and helmets. So I ran from house to
house finding things to both arms myself with and cover my body but all of a
sudden a warning flashed up that the play area was shrinking and indeed when
checking the map this blue circle was coming in, and noticing that I wasn’t in
the white circle I decided to skidaddle. I found a dune buggy and headed
straight to the middle of the circle, getting shot at at one point but getting
away safely. Finding a safe place in the wooded hills I decided to abandon my
buggy and hide in a bush in a low part of the hill. And there I lay as the
circle got smaller and smaller hearing many shots and viewing the remaining
player count go down until the I needed to make my way down from the hills to
stay in the circle. So I crouch-ran my way to the circle feeling very exposed
but managing to keep to the trees and eventually got inside the circle, though
as I was making myself comfortable in another bush there a was a BANGBANGBANG
and I was shot down in a second by an unknown enemy and I also jumped about
half a meter off my chair.
Basic example of me running to one of the final circles, spoiler alert I don't make it but this video is interesting as I can see the whole thing play out to finish from the view after I died, which is very useful when playing in groups so you can let your teammates know where the enemies that killed you are.
And THAT was my first game of PUBG (solo that is) the screen after I died displayed a blaring “better luck next time” text and all I could do then was go back to the menu and start the whole process again. Of course there is a few more things to the game too and things have changed a bit since I started playing in 2017, wow 2017 it really hasn’t been that long has it though it seems an age ago. There has now been a vast number of changes and improvements as per the usual way of games these days, especially ones that start as ‘Early Access’ on Steam. PUBG development started in March 2017 was once thought to be one of those games stuck in ‘eternal early access’ with things slowly being added over time slightly improving the game each time, and only 9 months later
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| You have to have your skydiving skills down pat |
Playing PUBG now basically the gameplay is the same but a
lot of changes and fixes have been implemented since the early stages as one
would expect. It’s a pretty simple affair, you create your character then
simply jump into the game. One thing I like about PUBG is that you have so much
choice as to what you want to do, play solo, play in a team of 2 or 3 or 4 etc
other options include which maps you would like and the option to play locked
in First-person mode. As I detailed in my story playing solo is an exciting and
tense affair for me at least as I try to avoid direct combat, though the best
experiences come with playing with a squad. You can of course play with random
teammates which can be fun but playing with your friends on Discord (or whatever other voice chat you
prefer) is the best. My friends and I usually play third person and I actually
like this the best as I like seeing my player run and jump and crouch and hide
in the bushes and reload and shooting using third person looks awesome, it all
looks very cool and you don’t get to see it much in multiplayer shooters which
are usually all First-Person. Another reason is that I’m not ashamed to admit I
third-person-peek
which in case you haven’t done this already which I know you have, the act of
positing your player character in cover then using the camera to look around
where you wouldn’t be able to in reality. Yes it’s a bit suss but everyone does
it and First-person only servers weren’t introduced till almost patch 1.0 so
everyone did it.
There are advantages and disadvantages of third and first
person, first person gives you a more immersive experience and is more
difficult due to you not having much visibility especially when prone so it
makes the last few circles a bit more tense as almost everyone is in prone
position and they can’t see each other. Third person allows you see around you
much more easily resulting in you being noticed more easily especially when you
are crawling through the grass thinking you are invisible. In first person you
can admire your gun and all the rest of the item models, in third person you
can admire yourself and all of your cool gear which is why I am seriously
considering changing to a female model at some point. Other things you can do
in the menu is customize your character, get rewards (more on these in the next
section) view your stats and view replays of your previous games, the replay
feature is very cool as it records your previous matches (up to about 20) and
you can play them back in full 3D with a large assortment of replay editing
tools inc the ability swing the camera around, slow down or speed up etc
basically all the things you would come to expect for making some cool videos.
Just like any popular game these days, PUBG has a form of
the infamous loot crates. As
you play matches in PUBG you acquire Battle
Points (or BP) and these can be spent on two things, firstly if you are
unhappy with your gender or appearance you can change it for a mere 3000 BP. I
had never used this but after playing as a default guy for the entire period I
decided to try out a female character, which is something I don’t usually do as
I’m a bit uneasy with the whole thing but as I can change back at any time it’s
okay. Though man these female models are skinny and I totally realise the irony
of that statement, I mean after being the male models they look so damn small
and skinny and their necks are so long and seem to turn at impossible angles
and they look really frail and er well I’d better stop now before I get into
trouble. Anyway, the other use for the battle points is to purchase the loot
crates, there are different types of loot crates which have come out over time
and contain player clothing and weapon skins. This is fine as a reward for
playing though unfortunately some of the creates require you to purchase a key
with real money to open and that just makes me sigh and realise that’s just how
things are now.
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| Just taking a peek around the corner with my golden shotty |
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| The main menu |
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| At least I tried a female character, by the way this is the loadout screen where you can loot items, modify your weapons and view your character, as you can see I'm pretty well kitted up here |
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| I have a rather large wardrobe |
This is one of the special event modes in the game called 'War Mode' which allows you to respawn after you have been killed, this one gave you basically just a Ghillie suit and a Kar98 Sniper Rifle. There is a funny moment at 4:45 where soemone walks right over me and doesn't notice I am there heh
One of the things that has changed now is that clothes are no longer strewn around the buildings in the world, when you start the game for the first time now you are no longer forced to run around in your undies as you get a basic set of clothes and that’s it, anything else you must acquire from loot crates or on the steam marketplace. I am somewhat ashamed to say that I have spent about $42 US on clothing items as I have been trying to get the right look, I even purchased a brown leather coat for about $25 AU as part of the desert map outfit I was making that looked pretty cool but then I decided it was too hot so just wore a t-shirt. Of course there are still items of clothing strewn around the map that are regarded as ‘equipment’: Helmets and Vests provide protection while Backpacks and Belts provide more carrying capacity, the latter are not actually found in the world and are equipped by default. One of the most annoying things at the start of the game is finding all this loot then not having a backpack to store it all, sometimes when landing at quiet spots squad matches become a ‘looting party’ where everyone travels across a few locations looting as much as they can for about 20 mins unchallenged then we make our way to the next circle armed to the teeth only to be shot and killed in a few seconds by someone we never saw.
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| No we aren't doing a home renovation show this is an unofficially named 'loot drop party' where everyone drops loot they dont need then we all look through it and grab what we need. |
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| In the minivan with the squad hoping I don't get shot out, I like this shot heh |
The Danger in PUBG isn’t just form other players of course
the Playzone aka the
‘Circle’ is one of the biggest killers in the game, though there’s technically
two of them. About two minutes after the plane passes over the dropzone the
white circle appears, this is the “safe” area then the blue circle appears and
starts shrinking the play area, but takes a leisurely 12 minutes to reach the
edge of the white circle. If you happen to be caught outside the first circle
you do take damage but only a small amount, it’s just a reminder for you to get
going, though as the circles get smaller they do much more damage, especially
if the blue circle has stopped moving and you’re still not in the play zone.
The play zone shrinks at 8 different times, circles 1-4 are relatively tame
with circles 5-8 have you sweating and questioning whether to cut all ties to
your teammates and make a break for it. The play zone itself resembles a giant
wall of blue electricity which is rather imposing though not as opposing as
some other versions
I’ve seen, it leaves you with a few dilemmas. Things like: “Do I keep looting
or get going?” “Do I leave my buddy who has been downed to die or risk losing
my life too” “Do we wait for that other squad we were trading shots with to run
when the circle comes or do we make a break for it now” usually in these
situations I choose to run first as I hate dying to the circle, it’s such a
goddamn waste and disappointing.
Apart from the wall of death there are other
mechanics in the game to liven things up, the Red Zone indicated by a red
circle on the map appears as a warning that the area will be carpet-bombed
though this rarely results in death if you are stuck outside, all you really need
to do is get inside a building as apparently the bombs don’t penetrate through
roofes (they built them strong XD) There are also random air drops from planes that fly
past, these creates contain rare items such as the AWM Sniper Rifle, the 15x
PM II Scope and the Ghillie Suit all of which can only be found in these
crates. Because of this they are often dangerous to go near as they fall to the
ground slowly by parachute with a blinking light then when they hit the ground
a red flare comes up marking their position so basically every man and his dog
would have seen it come down. I generally don’t go near drops unless it’s
either right next to us or it’s in a hidden out-of-the-way place where I know
theirs is not many players around, but you never know so it’s always risky.
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| Sometimes the circle can look pretty damn scary as it rapidly surges toward you |
An longish journey across Erangel where we loot up then keep travelling, clear out a shed and find a drop crate then make a final stand in the forest.
So now we get to the maps, the sprawling landmasses of
both spoilt and unspoiled natural beauty with eerily abandoned and decayed
villages, towns, industrial centres, military bases, farms, quarries, ruins,
prisons, basically anything a small regional island (or area) would have. The
alpha map Erangel
was the first map set in the and possibly my favourite, I don’t know why, it’s
an island in the black sea in an eastern european setting and is based off the Chernarus map from DayZ which
itself was taken from Arma II,
maybe it’s the beautiful scenery with forests and farmlands and mountains, it
all just looks nice, the man-made structures though not so much. There’s really
no indication why the island is uninhabited, there wasn’t in the film really
either, there’s some story in the wiki page about the island was used for
military testing then there was a rebellion by the island’s population then an
electric field was used to keep rebellious towns contained but I guess it’s
just a filler, there’s no single player campaign and we don’t really need to
know why this is happening. A story I could believe though is that prisons are
overpopulated so they decided to kill some off by dropping us all on an
abandoned island that is abandoned maybe due to previous nuclear radiation danger
and letting us hunt each other down in a picturesque wasteland. |
| And a nice sunset cruise to finish off a day's killin |
One of my favourite PUBG videos I have made, this was quite a roadtrip.
Erangel was ‘the’ map for the majority of PUBG’s life, it
was only in December 2017 that Miramar
came along. We were all very excited for a new map, out in the desert, a
completely different landscape and it worked out well I think. There were
concerns that Miramar was too much of a city-centric map, the desert was hilly
in parts with some mountains and mesas if was a sniper heaven with little trees
and lots of exposed land, fighting mainly took place in towns and villages of a
South American country, though it seems more Mexican desert to me. One things
for sure, there are quite a lot of open roads and highways with a sort of
Biker/Mad Max feel to it and indeed the new clothing creates the Biker Crate
and Desperado
Crate did have that exact style of clothing which was pretty cool. And
along with this there were a host of new vehicles including an off-road
friendly Ford-esque pickup truck, a slow but roomy Volkwagon-esque van which
can seat 6 though unless it was a special event wouldn’t really be needed, a
Chevy-esque open topped muscle car and the weirdest looking jet-ski/dinghy
hybrid I have ever seen called the “Aquarail” though it’s fun to use to zoom
between the small amount of islands. Miramar is currently the only map that is
not an island as the western edge is blocked by a high mountain range and the
northern edge is blocked by a large steel wall which I think may be a reference
to Donald Trump’s comments.
After Miramar there was the introduction of weapon skins which was met with
mixed feelings as now with weapon
skin and clothing crates there were multiple versions and again some you
actually had to pay to purchase a key to open even after you spent your battle
points, this game was becoming like CS:GO
and Team Fortress all the time.
Anyway so after that a new map Sanhok was announced, this new map
would be different from the last two as it is much smaller 4x4 miles instead of
8x8 which would make for some much more action-packed and fast paced gameplay
and immediately I wasn’t impressed. I liked pubg being big cause I liked
landing in the middle of nowhere, travelling large distances across a huge
landscape and hiding in houses with your squad scanning the fields and hills
with the thrill of when you eventually seeing someone. I didn’t want the game
to become a closed-in cityscape gun battle like I’ve seen happen with the
Battlefield series and also games like Counterstrike that take it to the
extreme with maps that are overly simplified, like a bunch of 4 pillars in a
room and that’s the whole map, but anyway the map was going to be half the size
not like a quarter so I guess that was ok. The landscape itself was this time
going to be a mixture of Thailand and the Philipines which was pretty cool as
the name ‘Sanhok’ is a mixture of the Thai word for fun: ‘sahnook’ and the
Philipino word for chicken ‘manok’ so it basically means chicken-fun.
Sanhok is
a typical tropical south-east-asian environment feature rolling green hills,
lush jungle vegetation, rice fields, temples, beach resorts and traditional
rural housing. It also has a heavy military presence with many military camps
dotted around which reminds me more of Vietnam then Thailand or the Philipines
as they have names like “Camp Alpha” and “Camp Charlie” and even some of the
rural villages are called things like ‘Ha Tinh’ and ‘Ban Tai’ which to me sound
kind of Vietnamese so there seems to be a very Vietnam War things going on with
the naming but most of the scenery is reminiscent of the two countries as there
is a large cave that you can parachute into from the plane similar to the Pham Lot cave in
Thailand. Sanhok now has some new vehicles including the iconic Scooter and the Tukshai which you
may also know as the Tuk-Tuk.
After Sanhok the Training Mode featuring a smallish island where there are facilities to practice practice pretty much anything you do in the game, shooting, driving on land or water, parkour, parachuting, throwing grenades etc It's pretty fun to mess around with friends driving around the test tracks and jumping around the parkour course. A new survival reward system has also been created allowing you to gain more clothing items for doing specific task for example getting kills with an SMG or surviving at least 20 mins.
In case you didn’t know PUBG is developed using the Unreal
Engine 4, which made development faster than games such as ARMA and H1Z1,
which were built with proprietary game engines. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Green
said himself that development was difficult when creating such huge maps as the
engine was never built for that sort of thing. To be honest I think it looks
great, it looks pretty damn realistic and despite the fact that I may hinder
myself by playing with decent graphics I like to because the game looks so good
and I don’t think it really affects me, I’ve played things like 7 Days to Die
and to be honest they almost seem to have been made with the same engine,
though 7 days to die seems so freakin depressing. Anyway the graphics look
realistic, nuff said, there’s a bit of glitching but it’s fine, the game has
had some major graphical updates since its inception and now looks much better,
only after watching the Zero
Punctuation review where Yahtzee mentioned that most of the models look
like they were taken from the stock military/survival/fps and it’s kind of
correct, as your character doesn’t really have any kind of personality their
just a base multiplayer model that yells in pain on occasion but no change in
facial features though who needs that really it’s a multiplayer game.
I for one
like the beautifully rendered, grass trees and bushes and hide in them quite a
lot in fact a running joke about me is that I like to hide in a bush for most
of the game but with graphics like this, why not? I’m also a big fan of the
weather effects as at one point ‘evening’ ‘rain’ and ‘fog’ matches were
introduced and man did I like the rain and fog ones. The noise of the rain
muffled footsteps and even some gunshots and slightly limited visibility, fog
was the best as it severely limited your visibility making sniping virtually impossible,
but this was the same for everyone so it was fine. Bluehole actually removed
the fog and rain weather after players started intentionally leaving the match
which had this feature, which really sucks to be honest couldn’t they just
leave it in? To combat this, the maps now have dynamic weather so they usually
start off with clear weather then fog or a storm will roll in which is ok but I
really like to dress for the occasion.
In case you didn’t know already my preferred playstyle is
sneaking around and hiding and letting everyone else kill each other, though
this does not get me any wins, or “Chicken Dinners” as they are called. I have
heard of the saying before but it’s become like a sort of cliché of the game as
when you or your squad defeats the last remaining enemy or team you are
congratulated with a “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner” message though this doesn’t
have any relation to anything really it’s just a quirk. So anyway my way of
hiding in the bushes doesn’t work to well in the long run as when I get to the
point where I need to actually spot and kill someone I am woefully
inexperienced so much so that I found it a good idea to do some ‘hot runs’ by
dropping into popular areas like the school on Erangel or Hacienda on Miramar
where there is bound to be many others. When doing this you need to plan your
landing area carefully and make sure you spot any guns or ammo very quickly as
you’re often competing with others for loot so much so that you could run into
a room and find nothing and your enemy runs into another room stacked with gear
and weapons and it’s just your bad luck. But these kind of runs are great for
practicing your player-vs-player combat.
Another good way to practice this is
events, yes PUBG has had a fair few official
events from simple changes like 8-man squads and weapon spawn changes i.e
Crossbows and Ghillie suits, Shotguns only, 45.acp ammo weapons only to more
complicated things like flare guns scattered around the map that can be used to
summon armoured 4x4’s. And then there’s the game-changing War Mode, yes War
mode is basically a static circle, (about the size of circle 4) at a random
point in a map and there are planes constantly flying over the area so if you
die you can respawn, it’s based in teams and the highest kill count wins. War
mode is fun and good practice but it still makes me nervous as I don’t want the
entire game to be like this. And then there’s the custom modes, yes you can customise
the game to be almost anything you want, one of the weirdest modes I have
played was vehicles only, no weapons, so it was basically just everyone driving
around and trying to squeeze each other
out of the final circle before it disappeared.
PUBG has grown into one of the most popular games in the
world, as of 10/8/2018 it was Steam’s top
game by player count and has
officially cracked the top 10 best
selling video games ever and has seen a lot of publicity though not nearly
as much as publicity as you know what
but I’m kind of glad it isn’t as when the game you play is being featured on A
Current Affair it’s not often a good thing. PUBG is definitely my favourite
of the Battle Royale genre as it is now, I have never played Fortnite but I’m
not a fan of the graphics and the generally more fast-paced gameplay though the
building mechanic looks like a fun thing to mess around with.Totally
Accurate Battlegrounds was released
from the same creators of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator as a Battle Royale
clone with a very comical style complete with silly, locations, flailing dummy
player characters and a large and ridiculous weapon arsenal, I played with my
housemate and it was a lot of fun and I gotta say the TABG version of the
‘wall’ is the best I’ve ever seen. I haven’t tried out Ring of
Elysium yet but I it looks ok. Lastly I’d never thought I’d say this as I
am not a fan of Call of Duty but their upcoming ‘Blackout’
battle royale mode for Black Ops 4 looks pretty good. PUBG is also available on Xbox1 and interestingly Android and IoS too, I did install it on my tablet and have a play but frankly you know how I feel about using the tablet screen to play a game and it currently has no controller support, probably to stop others having an unfair advantage. Of course people have managed to use a controller through rooting their device, something I will never do. And even managed to get a keyboard and mouse working on their phone which leads to a massive advantage to someone who decides to do this and obviously the general playerbase is not happy as this tips the scales a lot when you're fumbling around with the touchscreen controls.
So if PUBG is that popular the developers must be doing
something right, but you wouldn’t think that when hearing from the community,
yes that’s right much like any kind of product or service, you often only hear
bad feedback and complaints if anything at all and with a game as popular as
PUBG this is a true as ever with one of the most toxic
communities around, on Steam the reviews are “Mostly negative” if you trust
that sort of thing. Yes PUBG has had its fair share of complaints including
things I’ve never heard of such as claiming the game has bad ‘optimization’
which can be described in this way "Good optimization means that the game
works at the same framerate across a wide range of hardware specs, including
low-end configurations." So this explains why I see complaints from
players super god-like high end system not displaying the constant 60fps framerates
or whatever they are after but tbh the only time my framerate seems slow is
when I’m locked in a gun battle with another player and that’s no time to check
your fps counter. I admit that PUB from the start isn’t the most stable of
games but you would expect something like this from a game in BETA. Though even
when PUBG reached patch 1.0 and was officially released a lot of the issues
were still there, things like not being able to see friends in the menu,
invisible walls, rendering issues, graphical issues, framerate issues and a
large one being server and connection issues as you often get random ‘server
busy’ and ‘cannot connect’ etc screens but you seem to be able to overcome them
by just trying again.
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| The entourage in the Chevy on Miramar |
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| The current three maps in PUBG (Sanhok not to scale though you can tell it's smaller) |
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| Ahh sunny Sanhok, one of my friends who is Thai says that some of the trees on the island aren't quite correct though |
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| I have a snipe at my friends at the Trainign island boatyard, you can the boating course further out and the 800m sniping range on the top right |
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| We are all very serious with our apples |
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| "Oh no and it was so nice and sunny when we first started too, oh well I guess they won't hear us coming over the thunder" |
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| There are hot drops in the middle of every map, and in Sanhok it was definately Paradise Resort, with the school for Erangel and Hacienda Del Patron for Miramar |
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| Have you ever seen this many cars at the same place? |
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| I like the angle on this shot |
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| Fog, hard to see whats in the distance, but much better frames per second! |
And then there’s the inevitable hackers the mostly Chinese
hackers are well known within the community. While I’m sure there are
people who hack from other countries it’s evident that a large number of the
playerbase hail from China as many a time in the lobby you hear Chinese
language-speakers, even in the Oceanic lobbies there were many. We didn’t
really know the reason that they were here though we guessed that there were
too many players (and hackers) in their own server so they decided to infect
us. Thankfully there is a deathcam feature in PUBG so you can see exactly how
you were killed however embarrassingly or illegally it was done and yes we saw
each other being spotted through buildings and landscapes and the suspect’s aim
snapping onto us then being shot at long range with no recoil and we can then
choose to report them for all these abuses but it’s just sad that a game needs
to implement this level of tools to combat hacking. More recently the oceanic
servers seem to be dead as queuing in that region leading to wait times of
almost half an hour if the game ever happens, I’m not sure whether it’s due to
failing interest or a server problem as we have to resort to playing on the
South East Asia servers which although we will have a ping disadvantage we are
able to get a game quickly. PUBG Corp interestingly released a new ‘Fix PUBG’ campaign aiming to make the game
better, something that has come a little too late for many players.
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| Eeeyowch, you can see the death cam and report options on the lower right, this guy was thankfully legit |
Despite all of these issues PUBG is one of my favourite
games still, it’s a great game to play with friends and I have had the good
fortune of the game to be adopted at my (sortof) local large-scale Lan Lan-slide with not one but three comps,
Squad, Solo and War Mode Duos. I don’t play it as much anymore as it seems
everyone just wants to play Sanhok and not the old maps and I’m a bit sick of
it though I will get back into it once the new Snow map is released. I will still
always regard Battlefield
2 as my favourite Multiplayer FPS and Vietcong as my
favourite combination of both story and multliplayer ever but this comes a
close third though they are all different in gametypes, in Battlefield there
was only conquest mode, in Vietcong we always played capture the flag and PUBG is battle royale (most of the time
anyway) If you’re looking to get in on the battle royale action then I can only
recommend PUBG as the original of these games, I can’t recommend Fortnite or
any of the others (with the possible exception of TABG) as I have not given
them a go. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is all I need and I will continue to
support it, well until the usual two reasons I leave multiplayer games, the
playerbase dies or something better comes along, that’s just the world we live in.
JD
10/10
Things I liked:
Battle Royale is awesome!
I like hiding
The ever present sense of danger
Great game to play with friends
Choice to play alone or with one, two or 3 friends, no set
number
Realistic graphics and environment
Character model and clothing customization
Very large play area, slow paced gameplay
Ability to rejoin game when game crashes.
Great death cam and replay feature
Leave and start a new game whenever you like, very minimal
waiting times
Things I didn’t like:
Many many bugs and issues
Many hackers
Mostly unpleasant community
Oceanic servers no longer playable
Having to purchase keys with real money to open some loot
boxes.
Getting killed early on then having to wait for your
squadmates to finish.
Can’t we all just be
friends?
