Ah, PUBG.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
Battle Royale.
The games that are taking over online gaming by storm. PUBG is one of those, and one of the first. A mod that turned into a stand alone game. However, there’s the question, is the game good? Is it playable? Do the users enjoy it? For my personal opinion, we have to go back to the beginning.
The Beginning
September 12, 2017. The day that I bought PUBG, even though it was still in early access. I had seen some friends play, as well as every streamer ever play it. I figured, why not? It was $30, which isn’t cheap, but not terrible. From what I had heard, the developer was very active in development. So I bought in.
For a while, it was fun. I had a group of friends I would play squads with and, being my first FPS on PC, I learned how to play with a keyboard and mouse. There were bugs, of course, and hackers, but it’s an early access game, you expect that. Right? Well, right.
Things looked good. Updates were coming in. Money was being made. Everyone in the world was looking forward to what the game would become.
Today
Fast forward to today, over a year later.
There are still problems. A lot of problems.
It’s not like the game doesn’t get updated. They push out updates all the time, even now, and shut down the servers twice a week for maintenance. It’s just… a conflict of interest, maybe?
The developers are really worried about money, or so it seems. Also, with the sea of battle royale games coming out, they are worried about staying relevant. The problem is, they aren’t really helping anything.
The company seems to be more about skins, maps, and weapons rather than fixing what they already have. Every performance update helps something, but breaks two or three more things. For example, one update left my buddies and I unable to even join a match. Not good.
And so, I’m tired. It’s fun, but I’m tired. You will have nights where everything is fine and you have fun. Then, you will have nights where you get shot around corners or lose fights you clearly should’ve won. The replay system is still so laggy that you can’t even watch a replay and accurately see what happened.
Honestly, at the start of the night, it’s like a toss up whether or not the server has your back. If it doesn’t, you lose a lot of firefights. If it does, you win those. It’s pretty crazy, but happens time and time again.
Even with all the issues, and me getting angry, I still have over 200 hours in the game. Why? Because it’s fun. It’s a fun game, when it works. The problem is when you push for it to be in eSports tournaments, then the entire world sees two players survive a grenade that exploded right at their feet (yeah, that happened).
It’s an argument. Because if you post about it, people say it’s your PC. All I can say is, I’ve played enough to realize it’s the game, and not my PC. If I can’t play a game with a GTX 1080, then I don’t want to play that game.
