Author Topic: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - Some sort of noble combat thing?  (Read 923 times)

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Offline The E

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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - Some sort of noble combat thing?
This game sort of exploded across the streams I watch regularly. Then a couple friends bought it, then I bought it, and now I'm having an awesome time sitting in bushes, being terrified of the smallest sounds.

So what is this? Simply put, it's another game in the series of battle royale arena shooters that begun with the likes of DayZ and H1Z1. Except there's no Zombies in this one (which, to my mind, is a really good thing), just 100 players trying to kill each other with a variety of modern and old weapons (and also, occasionally, frying pans). The arena in this case is an area of 64 square kilometers, filled with a large island that is dotted with a bunch of small settlements and a military base on a smaller island right next to it.

This game is highly addictive. The core rhythm of each round, from the start (which has all players start on a plane crossing the island and leaving it to the players to choose when to jump off and where to go from there), which is often frantic because everyone chose the same three buildings as their starting locations, to the more relaxed midgame as people loot houses to get the best gear while trying to stay in a periodically shrinking safe zone, to the again frantic endgame as you suddenly realize that you are in an open field 300 meters across with 10 other people who are just as tooled up as you lying in the grass waiting for the first person to give their position away, is brilliant.
Oh, and did I mention that playing this game in teams (the game puts solo players, two-person and three-or-four-person teams in separate queues) changes the experience a lot? While the core rhythm stays, running around in a small squad enables some interesting tactics and situations that aren't viable in solo. Vehicles, for example, are something of a trap in solo: They give your position away too quickly while also stripping you of the ability to fire back. In a team, a four-person car becomes much more useful.

Owing to this game's current status (It's been in Early Access since March), there are of course still rather a lot of unpolished edges to this whole experience: Performance is highly variable, and there's an unpatched memory leak in there that basically forces you to reboot the game every few rounds to avoid crashes, movement physics are a bit janky in certain cases (it can be frustratingly hard to jump over fences). In terms of graphics style, the developers chose a rather workmanlike approach: graphics are geared more towards functionality than beauty here.

So yeah. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG as it is annoyingly called, is an awesome experience and guaranteed to get your blood pumping through the sheer amount of terror and anxiety it can instill. I love it. If you have it and if we are steam friends and you are in the EU, I'm open for multiplayer rounds.
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