What's your take on the PUBG phenomenon and the Battle Royale genre?

The PUBG/BR genre is taking FPS style multiplayer games by storm.

And if you like me have tried it then you may have noticed how addictive it is. Personally I like FPS style games but the game mechanic/play flow of this game really hits that one more try button for me, is it just me or is PUBG onto something?

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What makes it good? Is it the combination of parachuting in unarmed, equipping and being funnelled towards the final battle combined with the fact that you are up against other players.

Do we need a Unity version of this game, or do our best existing Unity FPS style games need a BR mode?​

PS: On a personal side note I'm kicking myself as I created and DM'd a role playing session where the scenario was dropping into the eye of a storm to complete a mission. Also one of my early LD games pre-unity was Advancing Wall of Doom!

LOL if only I had combined my love for FPS, Survival Horror Movies and Advancing Walls of Doom!

 

PUBG is just dayz without zombies isn't it?

I think that an FPS with good loot system is kind of obvious, I'm pretty surprised it took that long for people to figure it out.

Although again - it took modding to find the 'new genre'.

In terms of unity, I think escape from tarkov is pretty similar no?

 

So battle royale is your new 64 bit transforms, huh.

 

64 bit transforms are still needed for large open world games/flight sims/space sims IMHO.

PUBG solves the 64 bit transform problem with an 8km2 map and shrinking circle o' doom!

8 km is quite a good size for even a 100 player game and takes some filling with content.

 

I think it's a cool idea. Definitely something fresh that has caught the action playerbase interest. Personally I dislike pubg but feel like the whole battle royale thing could be a lot of fun.

 

If you couldn't get into pubg, you might want to give Fortnite's Battle Royale mode a look. Its pacing is a lot different from pubg's and the building systems make it so that high level play can involve mazes and towers. It's also a lot more fast paced than pubg, which changes the encounter dynamics a lot.

 

I was lucky enough to get in to DayZ really early when it only had a few servers. Blew me away at the time, one of my best gaming experiences. After a while people just ignored the zombies and it became more like a battle royale game. They used to have a cool feature where if you just went around killing people you'd be forced into a certain outfit, meaning you knew who to avoid and you could at least half trust other random players. After they removed that the game seemed to go downhill.

Haven't tried PUBG yet as it looks rather glitchy and full of loot boxes that give rare loot ever 80 years (no exaggeration).

 

That is clickbait news and that droprate is actually pretty common in games.

 

it's also free

 

The boxes only contain clothing so it's nothing useful in the game and PUBG has already been criticised for it's lack of good fashionable clothing.

Although it is introducing a paid loot box key system so if you want to open any loot boxes you will need to purchase more keys.

One of the most annoying features of the game is the lack of damage indicators, you only have the gunshot soundfx and hit/splashed to give you and idea where enemies are shooting from.

Combined with cheaters who are apparently using aim-bots it can make for some frustrating games.

 

I initially played PUBG because I wanted to understand what the buzz was about. For the first several hours I played it, I literally hated and could not understand why about would play it. After that, it grew on me. It is my favorite modern game to play now. I absolutely love playing squads (25 teams with 4 players each) in PUBG. I am still not a huge fan of the solo mode.

One thing that I did not immediately understand was that PUBG is a thriller game and not an action game. It has some action sequences, but nearly all of the gameplay is a thriller rather than an action game.

 

I think a lot of the appeal is how you choose to interact with other players throughout the match. I also think it's one of those cases where it had just the right mix at the right time, nobody is going to repeat their level of success.

 

PUBG is in a precarious place at the moment with its playerbase. There is a wholesale user rebellion going down due to the fact that game was opened up to the Chinese market with no segregation, and those players are (apparently) ruining the game for everyone else. Also, there is a crapton of criticism recently about the gamess netcode and how flaws in it are ruining it. I was just reading through today, it was pretty interesting. Still #1 on Steam is #1 on Steam I guess.

 

Personally I like DayZ type games better. Firefights can go on for hours without a blue circle interrupting you. The luck factor of the circles is a big downer for me too

edit: funny thing, our game and PUBG shares a S*** ton of assets..

 

How does the damage/health mechanics compare with PUBGs revival armour system?

 

Instead of the selling point being the campaign and multiplayer modes, the selling point is 1 multiplayer mode and stripping away everything else, so they're actually selling you far less content for the same top tier price.

And it's not even polished content.

PUBG is just a game mode with the game stripped. And so is every other clone that will follow it from other developers. Eventually people will get tired of it and demand other game modes and we'll be back to square one. There's only so many kills and lobbies you can endure with mp and no respawn (which is quite simply what it is).

In short, it's not a genre, it's a game mode that went viral, and that was actually down to marketing* with a dose of luck, since that approach absolutely relies on a large healthy mp player base that already exists.

*They obtained that by getting all the top twitch streamers on one server during pre alpha.

 

So PUBG is to FPS what Flappy Bird was to Platformers?
Or BR is to FPS what Tower Defence is to RTS?

 

In DayZ? In dayz your armour get damage, if its not ruined you can repair it but not up to Prestine. If you take body damage you need to regane health. Either by eating and waiting or taking saline bags or blood bags. It takes alot longer time to regen in DayZ.

 

No, it's simply omitting content while the mentioned genres had to change design for distillation. PUBG is really just your basic survival shooter with no other game modes and no campaign sold for the same price as a full game with campaign and game modes.

I think it's genius for business, frankly and you can't really replicate its critical mass success (which MP lives or dies on) without a similar manipulation of twitch streamers and you could only manipulate them in a format that plays them off against each other, so it's success is based pretty much on how they totally played streamers.

Thanks to that it went viral and enough money was available for them to keep the ball rolling just fine and here we are today.

And for that, I give them a big thumbs up, it's fair. Also, any indie copying this game mode and expecting similar success is pretty much a total idiot. It will be very hard for AAA to get a similar amount of bums on seats. The twitch thing really did it for PUBG.

I should clarify the game is fun enough, but it's not actually the game more than the extremely thriving playerbase that gives it it's fun. It's similar in WoW - the people make it much more fun than the mechanics even allow, and this is because of the critical mass.

If you can get the players, they will make anything fun within reason as they are actually playing with each other. The game format helps but it is not mandatory, judging by other MP games.

If League of Legends started from scratch today, in today's climate they would have an uphill battle that's 10 times harder than when they started.

 

Its not the amount of content thats PUBG problem. Its the quality, its so little love and perfection that has gone into that game. Like there is floating objects everywhere due to laziness by the level designers etc.

 

Why is it one or the other to you?

 

The luck factor of the blue circle actually makes the game great. It forces things to happen, instead of allowing several hours of entrenched camping.

The blue circle makes the game feel like group hunting deer in real life. For example, in that style of deer hunting, sometimes you get to camp/post and other times you have to push. If you deer hunt enough times, you get turns doing both. Same is true of the blue circle. Sometimes you get pushed towards campers and other times the other players get pushed towards you. And just like group deer hunting, you have a chance to do well as either the camper or the pusher.

The blue circle was a great design choice. Without it, PUBG would have been limited to only the players who could play for several hours at a time. With the blue circle, each play through can be completed in under a half hour.

 

Yep I appreciate the film makers for introducing it in the original Battle Royale films. They realised that a whole island would make for a boring film without choke points. PUBG's flagrant copying was necessary or the concept breaks down. Hunger games did similar things to bring people together and move them.

 

Its a matter of taste I guess, I like the more free nature of DayZ

 

I realize that PUBG took concepts from a movie. What I am saying is the concept of a blue circle that creates a call to action every few minutes is a great design decision. Without the blue circle, matches would last literally hours.

 

What is going to be funny is when modding support is added to PUBG, because I think we will see modders create mods for PUBG to make it more like Arma 3, H1Z1, or DayZ.

 

I can just short of guarantee that PubG is a fad. That isn't to say that large, massive battle royale games aren't going to continue and be viable, by any means. But PubG is the first to seemingly make it reasonable. The idea of gradually reducing the active map size to keep the dwindling survivor count in an active engagement state is perhaps the most important aspect of this multiplayer approach.

I don't think that making a Unity version of it is valuable, unless you add a ton to the equation, both graphically and gameplay-wise. I think the best-bet is to encorporate such an approach into a solid single player experience, along with a plethora of other multiplayer modes. It would be like the sudden scramble to mimic Gears of War's Horde mode, and it would suffocate PubG, because it offers so much more than PubG does.

 

PUBG is a game for people with the attention span of a gnat.

Popularity and monetary success has, IMO, no correlation with quality on a technical or artistic level. It has no correlation with "genius" or clever design choice. I think that when it comes to games like this, is just a matter of luck more than anything else. Kind of like becoming a youtube star.

 

Well, it's more like gaming's equivalent to scene kids. It's like there are roaming bands that go from one early access, battle royale game to another. It's just a matter of time before they become hipsters.

 

That is a bit of an over generalization. A lot of gamers can sit down for up to 30 minutes at a time. If a gamer wants to play longer, it is really easy to jump into the next game from the lobby. The play duration of 30 minutes is very sensible, and it helped lead to success for PUBG.

One nice thing about the shorter duration is the game makes it easy to get started in the next match. If your squad wants to play for a few hours, your squad will get to play at least a half dozen matches. Some of those matches will go well, and others will not. You'll get a variety of enjoyable play during those hours.

 

I agree its more accessible for most. But for me it breaks alot of immersion. I love the long fights in DayZ, but its far from a game for everyone for that exact reason.

Plus its alot of dumbing down going on in PUBG to support the faster gameplay. Like all weapons fire something called 7.62 but in reallife some fires 7.62x51 (NATO) and some 7.62x39 (RU) etc, etc.

Oh and the arcadish movement system

 

I agree that some aspects initially break immersion. The ammo was initially a weird thing for me when playing PUBG. But I definitely agree with the design choice, since it made the game more accessible to a very broad audience. If they had chosen purely simulator design choices for everything (movement, health, ammo, match duration, etc), there would be a dedicated but very small group of people playing the game. They found the sweet spot for arcade vs simulator that worked awesome overall.

 

Fornight kinda sucks... a game where bullet spread is everywhere at a distance.. like a childrens gun game with nerfed weapons.. and building stuff thrown in, but makes zero sense from a realism pov, i'll just make a ramp up this mountain kinda strangeness.

it does have better fps optimization though..and free.

Anyway pubg battle royale.. I think designer of battleroyal just got really F***ing lucky with sony and h1z1 (and hippo already reminds us wasn't exactly original, with hungergames popularizing the concept, and plenty of minecraft server having survival game mods), and then he got even more lucky with bluhole offering him a designer position. With bluhole just putting in a lot of work to make a good game. Fully polished, well animated, just overall well done not without problems, but from a solo,duq, squad setup for multiplayer you can really enjoy something from it. I think looting buildings for good weapons/mods and utility keeps people coming back and trying it again. I just think personally it will get boring eventually as more people drop out of it with that competitive repetitiveness.. and if china and cheating carries on expect more people to bail out.. and want other games with better gameplay modes (with some similarity to the looting gathering aspect). F*** L4d3 could come out and crush it if Valve weren't so F***ing lazy. Right now its just a good game that has filled a gap.. what else you gonna do play gtav hackerville.. cs fcking go? for nth time?

You look at every other game (minus h1z1 (which was good and could have been better, but got infested with hackers and seemed like sony gave up on the original vision).. but every other fps game that has implemented battleroyal as a gamemode are all limited by gimped engines.

like rust.. here is a game that has battleroyal mod made through oxide (though its more like just a closing circle without the loot gathering), but its just F***ing S*** because the actual game its built in doesn't really allow for it to be all that great plus performance/memory suckage with unity engine woes..mostly just bad game design choices.

arma2/3 just meh (ok arma3 much better now but still) with awful inventory system /in game object handling.. but spawning items in houses works so thats most your true battleroyal gameplay mode done, still kinda sucks when the inherit game is a simulated walking simulator and you get out of a breath 30seconds of running.. or jumping over fences.. its all just kinda rubbish and not really done well as modders have to work around everything the original gamedevs did.. where pubg just streamlines all this unfun S*** into an cohesive fun game.. run indefinitely with couple hundred bullets and loaded weapons on you and a lvl3 backpack from one side of the map to the other end .. makes it a fun game with large terrain maps that you can see off into the distance with and scoped weapon mods to use.

in my opinion pubg could do a lot to extend the gameplay into other areas.. but i think they will focus on the big esport side of it... and F*** modding api's or other coop like gamemodes with more of a team survival vs ai zombie etc, or larger team vs team..they don't want player run servers and that will mean they won't allow true game modding..so to me it deserves to die (albeit slowly while we wait for something better) and be replaced with games that do better in those areas... already see more people playing squad with randoms in pubg because its the only way to have some fun in the game without dying and having to find another game so soon (because when you have 99enemies instead of teambased with less enemies in total to stumble into as most squads move around in groups), and you're not all going to make it to the top 5 everygame. People will eventually tire of that (or maybe I'm wrong they'll just keep coming back because of that). Anyway I've noticed even going in solo in pubg you will often find you're in games that have had other people go in as a duo/trio/squad, F***ing pisses me off. I enjoy squad games aswel but when I do solo queue I expect everyone else in the game to be solo too. So they can't seem to even keep solo queue for solo queue matched players of similar skillset ranking.. So when more notice that, I think it will lose its competitive appeal and yeh that whole hacking problem getting worse.. but yknow if they add more gameplay modes, don't get greedy and retarded on crate S***, i'm sure it will continue to sell and have a large player numbers. or kinda fade out like Ark after they F*** it all up too much.

And if not that, then the game will ultimately be succeeded by other games that come in do a similar thing saturating the market but offer better variety in maps, gamemodes or modding. F*** if rockstar weren't so S*** they'd just do battleroyal in gtav properly and call it a day...you know seeing as it literately already has large open world.. plenty of buildings(albeit not many you can go into which would need improving), cars etc.. but the implementation they have is kinda gimped in comparison to pubg.. so pubg wins.. can already see other companies trying to jump in on the craze for newer game/modes coming out later this year. Farcry 5 battleroyal? yeh probably ..they'll all be doing it, until something new is popularized for the time. And I'm fine with that, lets hope Brendan Greene et al don't try to patent the idea of a game mode because the industry kinda thrives on making spin offs based on existing idea's and that should always be possible even if the games tend have fking useless modding api's (not helped by some engines even if the developers wanted to make modding easier they'd have to go through a lot of trouble to add it) and make it difficult to really utilize a popular game for making single/mulitplayer mods without forcing users to just attempt making an entire game from scratch where they will hit numerous problems and likely give up trying to do everything else instead of focusing on the experience they want to bring to players.

Unity still have a problem with offering developers a solid solution on large quality terrain and well the network handling seems to be another area most seem to have to find better solutions they do themselves or are done by other people. Noticing alot of UE4 engine games are literally being built over the top stuff Epic have done with there own games. Right from the fps multiplayer shootout demo...Unity do a lot of talking about things like game templates but then you end waiting around for it a while.. like nested prefabs.

 

There were 8 F***s given but only 4 S***s were had about the subject. In any case I don't give a F*** and S*** happens, all things being equal.

In other words, that's a total of 36 supra scriptum est in asteriscis, making this scriptum just as valid as the above, validating Unity's decision to turn on filters.

 

So basically posts like those are why we can't have nice things?

 

Whats a phenomenal about it? People liked multiplayer shoter since ever.

PUPG just got lucky but this genre was there for long time already and specialy today when all games become crap. Look Planetside promised same and was popular even tho could not deliver this promise.

PUPG is technicaly crap yet people waited for an easy game that you can just log in and have fun without complecated grind or pay2win crap so they buy it. Even i was trying to produce a game like PUPG for years but i have no useful friends to work with so i could not yet i am trying.

 

I wouldn't call PUBG lucky. I would call it clever use of twitch streamers to create the critical mass required for a multiplayer title to function.

 

I don't know why people are saying its technically crap... or anything similar.. if PUBG technically crap to you.. then what in the chupala position does that put alot of other games in? The character animation system and animations that are used for climbing up over world objects is clearly more effort than most games implement (jumping and crouching is about it). I'm not sure if that is just because UE4 makes it easier (even the clothing system for it..for sure it does) with the tools provided or that the team behind it did a fair bit of work on it.. point is the game is far from cludgie. We could talk about comparative masimba all day though, I think point is that to recognize that the game is not just popular because of the social competitive aspect and marketing of twitch streams popularizing the game.. it clearly has some technical effort and alot of hours put into making it a game people want to spend time in again and again.

Anyway I just think its sad that PC game modders are seriously lacking a decent DUCKING game that has good character customization system offers a modding toolkit to allow them to build newer game experiences and mods within those high quality games utilizing alot of the baseline feature, networking that is built with that game..yknow something better than Mincraft right (bless notches billion dollar soul for reneging and not doing as he said he would in opening sourcing the game). If you took all the FPS games that have sold on steam in the top10 in the last 5years and they all got great modding toolkits.. PUBG would be a good one to look at for a lot of people I'd imagine..higher up than arma3 for many reasons UE engine for one... probably along with 7dtd voxel terrain/building system. Sadly the last decent FPS games to actually have decent modding/mapping/api source kits were Valve and they are too greedy/lazy to do that now. So have to rely on UE4 and Unity etc democratizing game development ... at a pace and sometimes direction that is clearly still in advantage to those who have the resources to throw at all the other failing areas that need doing before you can even get to building the actual gameplay you wanted.

Seriously? omg asterisks and expletives.. those poor fragile minds that can't handle the amygdala triggering /Thank putang for coddling filters right On my own forums ... filters don't exist so that users don't have this stupid child like adult mind pandering for those who can't handle it and take unnecessary offense from it where none was intended ...Anyway how well do those useless filters work in censoring other language expletives.. not at all....colorful english language discriminators ..the absolute worst jk

 

You're already censored by the forum so you don't need to censor your censorship

 

My posts are an art form (lol shhht), creativity like that shouldn't be stifled by asterisks oppression, so I'll work around it from time to time

 

We're not lacking great games with good modding capabilities. We not only have some fantastic games (examples below) but we have some fantastic experiences made by fans for them.

The Elder Scrolls spawned Arktwend, Myar Aranath, Nehrim and Enderal.

https://sureai.net/games/arktwend/
https://sureai.net/games/myararanath/
https://sureai.net/games/nehrim/
https://sureai.net/games/enderal/

Fallout 4 is spawning Fallout Cascadia.

http://www.falloutcascadia.com/

The Neverwinter Nights games by Bioware have spawned persistent worlds (graphical MUDs).

https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/24/the-game-archaeologist-the-persistent-worlds-of-neverwinter-nig/

What you seem to believe we're lacking is basically a kitchen sink that is ready for making games. We already have that though. It's called Unity. If you need character customization we have UMA. If you need networking we have HLAPI.

 

Is it just me or does the PUBG lighting system seem off, distant characters appear much darker than they should. It removes any impact of clothing/environment camouflage.

 

Yes, characters are far easier to spot in the distance than they should be. The foliage system nearly hides people who are close but makes people in the distance very easy to spot. In real life, foliage will make people in the distance nearly impossible to see. So PUBG's foliage system works the opposite of how foliage works in real life. They need to come up with a way to make distant people harder to see without losing performance.

 

It is not accurate to call PUBG crap. There are things that could be improved, but overall it is an awesome game that is really fun to play. There are over 3 million simultaneous players because it is extremely enjoyable to play.

Try playing PUBG with an open mind. Or at the very least, watch some popular streamers play PUBG so you can see what all of the fuzz is about.

 

This is a problem I've seen in a lot of shooting games that involve long distances. Not specific to PUBG.

Probably a very easy thing to overlook, and perhaps difficult to fix?

 

Well i played it then i refound it. I dont understand how people can play a shoter with such bad hit registration. Also this whole game look like some 10 years kid has thrown some random assets together. To me its a mistery how it become so popular and i can only explain as luck and that people wanted such royal batle that planetside promised.

 

I'm not even sure it should be fixed. Long range sniping is a very strong strategy already in many games, and if the snipers can fully conceal themselves in tall grass or bushes, then they'd be very overpowered at long ranges, which likely isn't fun for the people being sniped.

 

Good point especially with no damage/shot direction indicators in PUBG.

Other games use a the sniper scope reflection lens effect to highlight where a sniper is and that they are looking in your direction, it could provide balance for an improved realism of visibility at range.

 

One thing PUBG does well is it balances "camping." Camping is a common complaint in many other FPS games, but in PUBG you can only camp in a single spot for a short period of time before you're more than likely going to have to move yourself. Setting up a camp is still advantageous in PUBG, but it takes some thought and planning. Where did the plane fly over? With the circle over there, are most people moving from this direction or the other to get there? Your camp isn't going to last more than 5 minutes regardless of how well you set it up anyway.

 

Little bit surprised at how dismissive the general tone is here. As for myself, I can respect what they've done, the amount of sales they have is absolutely incredible, but I don't have the slightest bit of interest in it. I only learned about the "shrinking blue wall" thing because I read a PCGamer article about a guy trying to turn a Sims session into a Battle Royale-esque match.

I heard there was actually a book that did it first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(novel)