Playerunknown's Battlegrounds

The Game Room
1

https://www.playbattlegrounds.com/main.pu

Anyone else played this?

It’s a Battle Royale/Last Man Standing game. Up too 100 players airdrop onto an island and have to quickly scavenge for weapons, ammo, protective gear and supplies.

Every 3 - 5 minutes the play area starts to shrink and if you’re caught outside the moving barrier you take damage until you get back inside. Camp too long or move too slow and you will die. You can die to one or two shots so you have to balance stealth with speed to keep moving and stay alive

Matches take 20 - 30 minutes per round and are some of the most intense gameplay I’ve had in a shooter (you can have both 3rd person and 1st person views).

The first two games I died pretty quickly, the next few I made it to the top 50. My best so far was getting to third place - even then I only saw five other players and got 2 kills the entire game.

There are also pair and quad game modes which pit small teams against each other.

2

I’ve been thinking of grabbing this one. I’ve been kind of leery of jumping in on the whole early access survival/battle royale/whatever genre because they all seem pretty aimless. But I guess this one isn’t quite that - it knew what it wanted to be from the start and was designed from the ground up for it. H1Z1 king of the kill was on sale for $12 last week but I passed figuring that this one was probably better.

What’s the balance between moving and camping? I know you have to move since the available world shrinks, but is there an incentive to move around and explore, or do people pretty much hide in a bush until they can’t anymore?

3

I’ve played it.

The good : it has fairly solid, tense gameplay. It calculates bullet drop, it has a good inventory system, vehicles are drivable and fun, the environments are realistic. It has great lighting and uses UE4.

The bad : you can be shot in the back or unexpectedly, and most of your deaths will be this way. The fundamental way the game plays is unfair - usually when you encounter another player, they will have an assault rifle, and you will be dead in seconds if you didn’t see them first and get the first shot. There is a third person camera, so running in the open anywhere is insanely dangerous because players can hiding behind something spying on you in third person, and you have no chance to see them until they decide to gun you down.

It also uses client side prediction, so if the server is a little laggy (a common occurrence), other players can start shooting and kill you before on your screen you even hear the sound of the first shot.

4

In its defence, it is Early Access.

Your initial drop is the most important part, IMHO. I’ve played it a fair amount at work (I am a games programmer and hence we tend to have lunchtime and after work sessions) and we’ve had a blast in four man squads. We normally decide on a place early on but if we see anyone else dropping even remotely close the squad leader makes another mark on the map and we head for there. The longer you stay in the plane the more likely you are to be alone when you drop and hence will have the run of the houses you drop near.

So far my best is 5 and someone else on my team was 3.

5

None of my criticisms are likely to ever be fixed, they are not EA bugs. The client side prediction is a common decision as to how to handle network latency, and plenty of finished games, including the recent Battlefield Games and every Call of Duty game and Rainbow Six Siege and others all use it. It creates a coherency on your screen at the expense of sometimes getting killed by someone you thought you shot first.

The third person camera is another style decision, plenty of 100% complete games have a third person cam that can be used to spy on people without being seen yourself. It just creates a feeling that your death was unfair.

I’ve gotten Winner Winner Chicken Dinner 6 times now.

6

Game design can change during development. Sometimes radically. Disabling the option for a third person camera is easy.

7

Is there a shooter where you can’t be shot in the back or unexpectedly?

None of this stuff is “unfair”, everyone is playing with the same rules. It sounds to me like you aren’t very good at it yet. I get it, I’m hopeless at multiplayer shooters and often get killed unexpectedly or can’t make a kill unless I start shooting first. That’s the game isn’t it? Making sure you see the enemy first and start shooting first.

8

It’s by turns the most frustrating and exhilarating game I’ve played in ages.

Frustrating in that it is easy to die to someone​ you will never see or if you get a bad RNG roll might not find any weapon in the few places you loot.

Exhilarating - today I was looking in a house and had just picked up an AK-47 and enough rounds to fill a magazine she is heard a noise an just caught a good another player peeking in a window and was able to track their movements by sound as they circled the house. I moved into a corner switched to auto and waited.

About a minute later the door swung open and … nothing happened for about 30 seconds more until the other player peeked in and I got of a burst.

I barely had time to loot his gear before I had to take off sprinting to stay ahead of the closing barrier.

9

Think I’m going to get it, but 2 questions:

Is there hacking? What kind?

And can you get a competitive edge by turning off graphic settings? Like shadows, grass, etc.? That shit is toxic and makes everyone play the game in the worst possible state to make it competitive. I would hope for a game like this it would be designed from the ground up to prevent that.

10

Most likely there is, but I haven’t seen the forums aflame with complaints so it’s probably minor right now. There are still engine/rendering glitches that need some work. I’ve seen a few videos of people hiding in houses getting shot by players for whom the house hasn’t rendered - the dev’s seem hard at work on that right now.

My understanding (which could be wrong) is that that was possible in earlier versions but has been disabled.

Reddit and the official forums should be able to give you more complete answers.

11

I hadn’t heard of this game until I saw this thread, but now that I’ve looked into it I have to say that I’m both sorry and glad that it has no Mac client: I’d be playing this non-stop for weeks if there was.

12

I’ve just purchased it. So far it’s fun, only played a few rounds.

Two things. If I die and click return to lobby then exit game the game basically stalls. I usually have to ctrl alt del out and restart. Pain in the neck.

I wish I could disable the scroll mouse weapon change. It’s too easy to accidentally change in the middle of action.

I’m Octarinefire in game.

13

Update: I suck at this game :slight_smile:

14

So do I.

I’ve just started playing with some friends using TeamSpeak for comms and it changes the game immensely. We’ve had a few near-fatal ‘friendly-fire’ incidents which add to the craziness. But moving in a group and having someone call out a contact or start getting shot at ups the tension a lot.

Last night for example: team of 4, we had a bad drop and had a handgun each, a single mini-Uzi and a shotgun (me) with 5 rounds. We were in a group of buildings with a strip of low grass about a 150 yards wide separating us from the next structures. We decide that I will move across first with the rest of the team covering me as much as they can with our armament.

About 1/2 way across I spot another player running near the building I’m heading to. I go prone and call him out to the others. Enemy player is still visible so I start to crawl towards a bush to get some cover.

Enemy player gets shot by a third party. Suddenly another (4th by this stage) person stands up about 15 yards from my position and starts shooting at the sniper that got his buddy!

4th guy starts heading for downed team-mate when I nail him with the shotgun. I go to loot the guy when the sniper gets me (had just been suppressed rather than killed)! My team then wait until they see the sniper sprint off over the hill (blue-wall’o’death is approaching) and move out to revive me.

Another two-man sniper team who had watched all this take place get all three of my team - game over.

15

So I’ve had it for a few weeks. I like it. I’ve actually gotten pretty good at solo, cracking the top 10,000 on the leaderboards … which feels significant to me in a game with millions of players. I’m not great at racking up kills - in fact despite this rank my kill ratio is only like .85 or something like that. Mostly I’m smart about how I move and approach the final areas.

What’s funny to me is how much every random player seems to treat this game like a deathmatch game rather than a last man standing game. It seems like if someone sees you, they’re going to come after you no matter what, no matter what risk it puts to them, no matter how little they have to gain from it. I’ve had guys camp the stairs and trap me in the upper floors of a building, and we just had a standoff for like 5 minutes until the blue field comes by and kills both of us. What’s the point of that? Whenever a situation turns south, I’m willing to ditch whatever I’m doing and just survive.

Similarly, if you land near anyone, and you could easily just split up and go your separate ways, everyone will run up to you and try to have a punch fight with you. WTF is the point of that? You don’t win the game by killing 99 other people, so why provoke every 50/50 situation you can?

But I suspect that irrationally suicidal “I SEE SOMEONE, I MUST CHASE THEM FOREVER” shit is why I’m able to play low key and stealthily and make the top 10 a lot. It just makes me think most people don’t understand the basic concept of the game.

The main problem with the game itself is the pacing of the end game. I don’t understand why they want it to end so abruptly. Once you’re down to the 4th or 5th circle, down to 15-25 people or so, the circles come so fast that you have almost no time to look around, move anywhere but straight towards the circle… you might have 10 seconds to resolve a firefight because the blue field comes and forces you to sprint into the safe zone. You rarely get a chance to loot someone you’ve killed. How the top 10 ultimately resolves often comes down to the random factor of who was lucky enough to get the next circle where they already were and who needed to run further to get there.

It seems obvious to me that towards the end the circles should be bigger. It would give a longer amount of time for people to move and fight, it would lower the random advantage/disadvantage of a tiny circle as the circle would require less drastic movement and cover a larger area.

I mean, the last 10-20 people is the most interesting part of the game. Why make that the most forced, frantic, desperate sprint for random circles rather than a slower, more interesting shootout?

16

After 54 hours I got my first chicken dinner today! Bloody intense as the last circle was all open field. Finished with 9 kills - going to go have a break after that.

17

If you have Arma 3, there is a multiplayer mission by PlayerUnknown called Battle Royale. That’s where it all started. Apparently Battle Royale is a full mod now, but not sure if there are still servers since Battlegrounds is out. Mod link: Steam Workshop::PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battle Royale

18

Player Unknown created the arma mod battleground and then developed the standalone.

Still playing when I can. Fun but solo is tough.

Check out wtfmoses for videos and streaming. He’s no Grimmz in terms of being able to play 20 hours a day but I really enjoy watching and learning from him. Great sense of humor.

19

So a few days ago I have discovered One Weird Trick that will let you win at this game like crazy. It’s not a hack or an exploit, it doesn’t even really require a change of tactics.

Since I have discovered this One Weird Trick, I have played 6 games in solo with the results of: 2nd, 2nd, 9th, 53rd, 1st, 2nd, 10th.

The 53rd I could’ve done better on, but I saw the chance to run 2 guys over with my buggy even though I’d likely die and I had to take it. I did run them both over, but died in the process.

In duos, we placed 2, 1, 2, 8, 20, 2.

In squad, I didn’t record the exact placements, but we won 2 out of 7 games.

My kill ratio has also gone from like .8 to something like 3.5.

If anyone disbelieves, I have screenshots and videos and such.

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Please share!

::I feel like I’m about to get rickrolled::