PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is a last-man-standing shooter being developed with community feedback. Starting with nothing, players must fight to locate weapons and supplies in a battle to be the lone survivor. This realistic, high tension game is set on a massive 8×8 km island with a level of detail that showcases Unreal Engine 4’s capabilit

Bluehole and PLAYERUNKNOWN (Brendan Greene) have been hard at work on their latest patch for PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS . The Early Access Month 2 Update brings a new vehicle, a new weapon, client performance optimization and much more. The update is scheduled to go live on May 25 5PM KST/1AM PDT/8AM UTC and is expected to take approx. 1 hour to compl

Over the past few days, I’ve dipped my toes into PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds partly out of curiosity and partly because of my friends that have become obsessed with the title. While I’d known about it for some time since its availability in late March, the noise surrounding Battlegrounds has only grown over the past three months, especially considering the fact that it has sold over 4 million copies alone since its Early Access de

Specifically, the biggest of these hazards is a blue electrical field surrounding the map that, over the course of the match, gradually pushes players into a select region of the map over time. Those that are unlucky enough to be outside of the field (or the “blue circle”) will meet their demise, while the circle also acts as a way to corral players from across the vast map and force confrontation. Naturally, that means players not only have to be on the lookout for other players, but also requires a constant situational awareness of what is happening on the map, and how to avoid getting killed by the environment or using it to your advant

Likewise, the actual design and visuals of PUBG are equally a mixed bag. Character models in particular take on some odd qualities and though players can customize them to their liking, they aren’t exactly stellar looking and the cosmetic options that the game provides (even with loot crates and microtransactions) are limited, at best. The maps are perhaps my favorite aspect of the game’s aesthetic as their vast draw distance and varied terrains are impressive, other than the occasional low-res textures or copy-pasted building and town layo

PUBG clearly has more work to be done after its nine months of Early Access, but I’m more than looking forward to seeing the experience get bigger and better over time. Despite its initial hangups (and the issues that still plague it outside of Early Access), there’s an incredibly strong foundation to PUBG ‘s gameplay that’s clearly going to evolve in new and exciting ways. The version of PUBG that I’m reviewing now is very much going to look different a year from now, and honestly, that might just be the most exciting part of where this massively popular game heads n

After landing, players must then scavenge the environments and abandoned houses nearby to pull together weapons, ammo, and other equipment that will ensure their survival against the 99 other players and try to be the last one standing (resulting in winning the game’s signature “chicken dinner” ). While the basic strategies and how the matches play out start off fairly similar, Battlegrounds proves to be anything but familiar as every match can play out radically different and unexpected at virtually every t

I was one of those people for quite some time. Over the course of various preview events, conventions, and on my own time I’ve dabbled with a few different Early Access titles or Project Arc survival games to varying success. Recent titles of the past few years, like Rust , We Happy Few , or ARK: Survival Evolved , grabbed my attention for a short amount of time thanks to their unique premises or ideas, but ultimately I ended up losing interest from some of the usual quirks of the survival sim genre. Given their love of crafting systems – which I often find unintuitive and confusing – and the need to monitor a series of Hunger/Thirst meters with death usually inches away, I’ve bounced off most of those titles fairly quickly. Survival sims can sometimes be intimidating to newcomers, and as a result that’s sometimes made me reluctant to try t

Where Erangel’s wide open fields and mountains tend to favor medium to long-range combat (ie, assault rifles and snipers), the valleys and tight corridors of Miramar make close-range combat the more preferred way to dispatch enemies and survive thanks to shotguns and S

Originating from Greene’s work on developing mods such as DayZ: Battle Royale (originating from ARMA 2 and its subsequent DayZ ), Battlegrounds ultimately became a sort of mix of the attributes that Greene wanted to take from survival games – the emphasis on player choice and preservation – while refining some of its weaker points. Specifically, Greene’s focus on making large maps that would be difficult to pin down exact strategies from game-to-game play a large part of what Battlegrounds has turned out to be, while item randomization ensures that no match plays out exactly the same as it did bef