Online Battle Royale games have become increasingly popular following the release of games like ARMA 3 and H1Z1. Trailing these other titles, in March of 2017a game named PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds arrived on Steam as an early access beta. People flocked to the game in droves, curious about what the game had to offer.

It turned out to be more than just addictive, providing people of different skill levels with a variety of accessible ways of getting into the game. In keeping with the Battle Royale archetype, PUBG is a death match shooter that pits 100 players against one another in a fight for survival, with the last man standing claiming victory. But exactly what is it that draws people to PUBG?

PUBG’s Steady Growth

Like any online game, PUBG had its closed alpha and beta tests before opening to the public for the early access phase. The alpha and beta tests were used to iron out some possible problems regarding the game’s balance. Once that was settled and the game opened to the public, its population swelled in anticipation of the official release.

The game quickly began to draw attention, particularly because its novel premise gave it considerable replay value, something lacking in many other contemporary shooters. The game’s designer, Brendan Greene, believes that an online game is far more interesting if it has a map that updates itself with randomized locations for weapons and armor, rather than havingfixed item spawns that players can memorize, thereby undermining the inherent equality and thrill of each match.

The game offers a large map of approximately 8 x 8 kilometers, or 5 x 5 miles. Each match begins with the players riding in a plane that flies over the map along a random route, giving players the option to choose when they want eject from the plane and parachute down. There is a strategic element to this, because when and where you decide to eject will affect your chances of landing by a house or similar shelter,where you hope to find weapons and armor to aid you in your fight against your opponents.

PUBG’s arsenal includes an impressive array of weapons, weapon attachments, armor, ammunition, and consumables, all scattered around the map at random or stashed in the occasional supply drop crate. Winning the game, killing enemies, or surviving longer grants you more money, which you can use to buy cosmetics.

PUBG skins are available for sale, in and out of the game, and are purely cosmetic, allowing you to customize your character without unfairly impacting the balance of the gameplay.

Once people acclimated to the game, which didn’t take long, they greweager for the officialrelease, and the increased servers and console ports that it would entail.

PUBG on Consoles and Multiple Platforms

PUBG’s popularity grew rapidly following the game’s success in early access; surpassing nearly all other games on streaming services such as twitch.tv, trading blows with League of Legends at the top; and surpassing Dota 2 as Steam’s most played game, reachingup to as manyas 3 million total players.

This did not go unnoticed by the game’s developer, Bluehole, which quickly rebranded into the PUBG Corporation. PUBG is plannedto launch on every platform, and is already available on Xbox One. The title was supposed to be an Xbox One exclusive, although only for a short time. As PUBG Corporation’s CEO, Chang Han Kim explained, the game will eventually be ported to PS4, but because Sony is much more stringent about ensuring the game is truly ready before its release – unlike Microsoft -the PS4 release has been delayed.

Microsoft provided PUBG Corp with much needed support, since the game is still practically in development, as evidenced by the many bugs and optimization issues that still need ironed out.

PlayerUnknown’s Battle of Bugs

Fromthe game’soriginal early access availability in March 2017, to its first stable 1.0 release on December 20^th 2017, PUBG has been plagued by bugs. Since the game was first released on PC, the bugs were quickly discovered by players and tech tube channels.

The game was built on Unreal Engine 4, which heavily favors Intel’s CPU instruction sets – a reflection of the protracted domination of Intelthanksto a lack of competition from AMD. However, once AMD got back into the game with its ZEN architecture and more-than-competitive Ryzen processors, more developers started optimizing for AMD CPU instructions, as well.

PUBG Corp is not one of these developers, yet, but seeing how both the Xbox and Playstation consoles have AMD hardware in them, optimization is sure to happen, once other gameplay related bugs are dealt with.

Regardless of the platform, PUBG is known to lag whenyou move the mouse around rapidly, and is known to suffer fromstutters approximately every 30 seconds. The game also has a 144 frame cap, the minimum for shooter games, with many serious players who opt for 240Hz not being able to fully utilize their monitors’ capabilities.

It was noted by some tech enthusiasts and tubers that the game offers average graphics on ultra settings, at best, while delivering abysmal but far from unplayable performance. This is significant negative for a multiplayer shooter where every frame per second counts, not to mention the absence of stable frame times.

Considering that PUBG has 3 million total players and about 2.5 million players daily on Steam alone, and that both the game’s developers and the media predict that it will become an esports title, making the game bug-free is a top priority, along with unbiased hardware optimization.

It should be noted that the official 1.0 releasedid fixmany of the game’s bugs.

Final Thoughts

PUBG is a gem among today’s online multiplayer shooters, offering a means of experiencing online shooters to players of all skill levels, and giving them equal opportunities to learn the game and its quirks and nuances.

The matchmaking and ranking system is good, matching players of similar skill ranks to providea challenge as well as some reassurance that you are probably not going to die within the first 20 seconds of landing.

With over 3 million players and over 24 million copies sold, PUBG is on its way to being one of the top 20 most sold games of all time.

PUBG does have its fair share of bugs, and keeping in mind that it only just released on December 20^th 2017, they still have a long way to go, and a huge player base to appease and delight with new and optimized content.