Now as those who watch our streams have noticed; I enjoy a game of PlayerUnknowns BattleGrounds (PUBG) quite a bit to the point where I play it a bit excessively.
I saw SovietWomble playing it and thought it was great, and from there my friend bought me a copy and I haven’t stopped playing it since.
But is it a perfect game? Absolutely not and I have quite a few things to say about it.
The first bit is that the game is sluggish, it’s slow it has two active maps at the time of this article which players, or at least my friends and I refer to as Mexico and Russia.
They are big maps, huge and the games tend to draw on for thirty to forty minutes at a time. However, we did get to try the new Savage map coming out and we must say that the map they are bringing in does help rectify a lot of the game’s issues by condensing it into one smaller 4×4 map where players can walk all around the map if they choose too. This has been enjoyed by my friends and I to a great extent and we are all eagerly awaiting the release of this map, with the release of the smaller map significantly reduced the load times and made it easier for us to grab weapons, and items, for quicker encounters.
When we are playing the main two maps of PlayerUnknowns BattleGrounds we are standing by hoping items spawn quicker for us than they do for our opponents, I guess you could shuck it up to balancing issues and our network connection is cabled with a 50mbs download speed so you suspect that we wouldn’t have these issues but we do. The other big issue we have had is getting equipped; if you watch a lot of other players you notice that they open their menus and drop items and equipment in as it is faster.
So if players know about certain things and tricks it gives them an advantage over the rest of the players in equipping themselves quickly where newcomers are pressing their pickup button hoping to get an item off the ground before the other player does. In a fair game, all players have the same chance but to learn or adapt to these other strategies is not common knowledge without diving further into its competitive edge.
The same can be said for clothes where if a player wears a certain piece of clothing they can use that to help blend themselves into their surroundings over clothes that are visually appealing. The worst of all PlayerUnknowns BattleGrounds has some horrible loot box statistics for acquiring some of these items. Where more common items from boxes will appear and can be sold through the community market more useful items or amazing cosmetic items are the most costly.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I do enjoy PlayerUnknowns BattleGrounds and I do win a few games from time to time with my friends. I am familiar with competitive gaming as I grew up playing competitive games, Yu-Gi-Oh! Dota 2, Battlefield, Counter-Strike, and the list continues. There is a strategic mindset involved with all of these titles so if you still want to pursue a competitive area for this game you may need to dish out a bit of money, but it does all boil down to how can you adapt to a competitive game.
I like the game, it has notable merits but in a few regards I do have to say with the spawning of copycats they have indeed left their mark, the most notable of this is Fortnite addiction to the battle royal genre. What started as a simple zombie survival game has evolved solely based on its battle royal principles. They do it better; they make it easier and adaptable for all players so it boils simply down to skill.
Where in PlayerUnknowns BattleGrounds you got to learn keyboard shortcuts, you got to adapt your clothing to help, you got to do all these things to help further your chances of being very professional in this game. I for one hate the fact that there are no prioritizing options; I want to grab a gun first and then ammo for the gun. I also don’t like that opening my inventory and dragging is quicker than just picking an item up. Fortnite does this better simply by allowing players the same single option.
It’s these little things that make a big difference, it’s why on YouTube Fortnite is beating Minecraft in popularity now, or why Fortnite is now the most popular battle royal game out there. By focusing on their core features I feel they can increase their overall potential; the game is good I enjoy it I got roughly three hundred hours in it. But I also see issues with it, loading times, and complaints about team balancing.
Heck, living in Europe right now you would expect I would get Swedish people, Danish People, Norwegians, and Polish people but more over than not I end up getting Russians and Chinese players all of whom cannot speak or communicate in a singular language which doesn’t help with team compensation as now they are all off doing their own thing in a squad-based match.
For the few players I did encounter who spoke English, I sent them a friend request and we keep partying through our discord server.
The game itself isn’t very balanced, and with an endless supply of cheaters, and modders ruining the experience for new players its no wonder why they are losing to their competition; their competition is doing it better than they are.
So where does that leave me in terms of a very long-winded rambling sort of review?
I like the game, I like it a lot but it has a lot of problems, and I mean A LOT of problems.
They have a die-hard fan base, but when the stars align, the game developers can aim to fix their underlying serious
issues that fans besides me have been complaining about then maybe their fanbase will grow some more.
Do these issues discourage me a bit from playing PUBG? Not really, I primarily play it with my friends and rarely do solo games;
the game doesn’t really spike my interest in solo queuing, I like to be able to talk and have a good time with people, and let the gameplay experience come from the actual experience with others.
But if you are a solo player, you have to adapt to the new strategies, you have to potentially invest a small amount of capacity for clothes to camo in, you have to learn all the tricks to grab items quicker, and that is only the beginning, I for one will continue to primarily do squad or duos, as I enjoy those more but that’s just my feedback. Also, you should know what to look for in kill cams to report cheaters.
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!