Calvert Edwards

Formerly known as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, PUBG: Battlegrounds is a battle royale game developed by PUBG Studios and published by Krafton. The game, which was inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), is based on Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene’s previous mods for other games and was expanded into a standalone title under Greene’s creative direction. It is the inaugural installment in the PUBG Universe series.

Gameplay and Design

PUBG is a player-versus-player shooter game in which up to one hundred players fight in a battle royale, a type of large-scale last-man-standing deathmatch in which players compete to be the last ones standing. Players may enter the match individually, in pairs, or with a small team of up to four members. The match is won by the player or team that survives the longest. 

Players begin each match by parachuting from a plane onto one of eight maps with varying sizes and terrain.The plane’s flight path across the map varies from round to round, requiring players to quickly determine the optimal moment to eject and land via parachute.

Players begin the game with no equipment other than customized clothing options that have no effect on gameplay. After landing, players can search for weapons, vehicles, armor, and other equipment in buildings, ghost towns, and other locations. At the beginning of a match, these items are procedurally distributed across the map, with certain high-risk areas typically having better equipment.  Killed players can also be looted for their equipment. The first-person and third-person perspectives each have advantages and disadvantages in combat and situational awareness; however, server-specific settings can be used to force all players into one perspective, thereby eliminating the advantages.

PUBG is the standalone version of what Greene considers to be the “final version” of the battle royale concept, incorporating the elements he created for previous iterations. Compared to ARMA and H1Z1, which were built on proprietary game engines, Unreal Engine 4 allowed for a quicker development cycle. Greene acknowledged that implementing the size of the maps in PUBG with Unreal, which was not designed with such maps in mind, was one of the challenges. The game was designed as a combination of ARMA 3’s realistic simulation and H1Z1’s arcade-style action focus and player accessibility. To prevent in-game cheating, the game employs anti-cheating software called BattlEye, which had permanently banned over 13 million players as of October 2018. According to BattlEye, 99 percent of all cheating software for the game was created in China.

Review

Why has this simplistic survival shooter gained such meteoric popularity? Well, PUBG is one of those games that you can quickly boot up, enter, and exit. Skydiving off a plane and surviving for five to thirty minutes in a giant sandbox keeps me coming back, whether with friends or alone.

After parachuting into a hellish landscape where everyone is out to get you, it’s you versus 99 other individuals. Your objective is to reach the top spot and earn the coveted “chicken dinner” title by surviving by any means necessary, whether that involves killing everyone else or simply avoiding harm. Every few minutes, a blue circle will appear on the map; you must travel there or slowly perish against an energy barrier. That’s the end of it. You can earn coins to purchase cosmetic loot boxes then return to a new session and play again.

Whether in third-person or first-person view, PUBG excels at the shooting aspect. If you don’t have the appropriate weapon, you can kill a player and take their equipment. Managing first-aid, a few grenades, and a variety of long- and close-range weapons is also relatively simple thanks to the game’s user-friendly menus.

The game’s affinity for chaos is its greatest ally. Your best-laid plans will fail occasionally. That one guy you’ve been stalking for the past five minutes? He probably knows exactly where you are and is just waiting for the right moment to snipe you; he just doesn’t want anyone else to know he’s nearby. Even getting rear-ended by a distracted driver, which often results in a very enjoyable experience.

Unlike its much messier Xbox cousin, the team was able to smooth out the majority of PUBG’s rough spots. Having played since the beginning of its early access campaign, the amount of progress is astounding, as not only is the game stable, but there is significantly less “jank” occurring around you (though it is still present). Standard features, such as vaulting, that are present in nearly every other shooter, as well as streamlined inventory management, are present. It took some time, but it is now PC-ready.

Even if the developer believes they invented a genre that has existed for years, their hubris and the hype surrounding PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have no bearing on this evaluation. It’s a rare occurrence that a game makes its way into my weekly rotation, but I still look forward to jumping into its insane survival world after all these years.