PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds 1.0 Game Review, a woeful misstep that isn't release worthy.

So it's now a couple of days into the apparent "release" version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Iv'e got to say, iv'e never seen a company fuck up in such a monumental way when they've struck oil, it's kinda like they hit oil in their backyard and decided to have an open fire BBQ and smoke a bunch of cigarettes, on the test servers the game was actually stable, while it wasn't release worthy it could be considered so if you remind yourself that it was a early access game from a rookie company.

However after a few days of playing it again full time iv'e come to realize the game is no better off than it was 6 months ago, save for vaulting, key complaints of the fan base are still there after almost a year and BlueHole seem to have no inclination of fixing them, the sad truth about PUBG is, is that it will probably never reach a point where the game can be considered release worthy.

So lets take a look at some of the things that have lead to me having an overwhelming negative opinion about something for a change.

The game is unplayable for the first 5 minutes.

Keep in mind this may just be for the OC servers, but iv'e heard reports it's on all of them so yeah, during the first five minutes of the game you'll be subjected to the most insane lag and rubber banding, to the point that unless someone is either standing still, or less than 20 meters away it's almost impossible to hit someone and put them down as after the first shot they begin to move and becomes incredibly hard to him them as you can't really guess where they're going to lag to next.

Couple this with the client/server disconnect and people can end up anywhere doing anything, this happened to me recently on the new map where we jumped out at a town, i landed and picked up the new winchester rifle, loaded it and shot a guy right in front of me(like literally 5 meters away) then lag glitches about 45 meters and has aimed me up and headshot me and killed me, on the killcam it shows me shooting at nothing standing still, which means not only did he lag, but my client lagged out from his client and two very different things happened.

Usually i'd play this off as a random bug but it happens so often it's basically a game feature at this point, the first 5 minutes are so bad most of the time that i land in the most deserted part of the map and just wait til the rubberbanding is over, personally I don't think a lot of people classify this as the "best version" the game can be before launching it as a full title.

China and SEA need to be region locked

This one particularly gets to me, as I live in Australia the lag isn't so bad that they can't play, but there's just enough lag so that they can get a massive hand up on us in numerous ways, now you may be asking why every region shouldn't be region locked, and it's a fair question, but there are two main reasons, one the vast vast vast majority of hackers come from china and the SEA servers and two, they actively exploit the lag they bring with them and use it to their advantage on an already laggy game.

Now usually having lag in a shooter is a massive detriment and usually makes it hard to play, however with Pubg's terrible netcode and glitchy nonsense, being laggy actually helps you as people can't hit you couple this with BlueHoles truly strange client/server connections means that a person from China can play on an Australian server have relatively no lag on their client, but can have lag to other people looking at them on the server, which means not only is there no downside from being laggy, it's actually an advantage because of how poorly the game is made.

Now look I play on North American servers with friends and i'm afforded that benefit sometimes, but the problem here is is that ALL of the regions are flooded with chinese and SEA players, in the past 4 days iv'e killed/been killed by maybe 10-15 western players and OC players on my servers, which means roughly 80% of games in OC are filled with people not in the OC region, which not only means the chances of the server being a lag filled nightmare go up, but the chance of hackers being present in the servers goes through the roof, especially on OC servers, which in a lot of cases makes you not even want to play at prime time.

There's no excuse for this and actively using lag to benefit your game play should be considered exploiting the game, and as more time goes on the more this increases and makes it an even worse nightmare.

The servers are somehow worse

I don't know exactly what they've done, but the servers feel like they're dying, i very very rarely get a game where it feels consistent from start to finish, this ties in with the first 5 minutes but the lasting problem is what really degrades the game, it's been like this for nearly a year now and it becomes increasingly obvious that this game cannot and will not support 100 people in the same server, now the game is designed and built for 100 players and it's a great idea but they have to come to terms that this just isn't going to happen, the game only ever gets really stable when at least 40% of the server has died.

In the ideal world, the perfect solution would be to completely remove the current server protocols and connections and build it from the ground up, sadly that can't happen anymore since the game is "released" which means any patch that comes out to "solve" this is never going to work because the basic building blocks are bad, to put it another way, imagine you want to build a really tall tower, but instead of making sure the foundation was as stable as possible, you just picked up driftwood lying around, the base is there but not very stable and the more you add to it the worst it becomes under the stress.

This is essentially what's happening with PUBG and nothing short of extremely professional code writing or reworking from scratch will solve, I honestly hope that BlueHole release a 50 player version of the maps because that alone will fix a lot of the bugs, but now that the game is launched that's probably not going to happen anytime soon.

Damage and aiming are still broken

As with everything on the test server it seems, the damage and ballistics changes were going to change the game in a very big way, but it seems all it's done is make it even more bullshit to have a consistent game, i don't know why PUBG didn't just stick with standard hit scan but it's painfully obvious now that their failed attempt at their own ballistics system is never going to work properly there are just too many bugs in the game for it to work smoothly coupled with their strange as hell character models and bullet registration it's just a god damn mess.

While the increased damage does work later on in the game once it settles down and most of the server dies off, at the start of the game it makes it so unpredictable because of the character models glitching around and the random lag, but it mainly has to do with their poor bullet registration, most FPS games use hit scan which means character models have hit boxes that determine where a bullet lands, for example in counterstrike if you hit the very tip of someones head it counts as a head shot since it's less than a fraction of a mm away from their head.

In PUBG however since the "hit boxes" aren't consistent with the character model, you have to directly shoot someone in the head with no room for error which means a lot of the time you'll miss shots that are dead on in your eyes, but not in the servers, my friend has this happen in a massive way last night on the new map as he aimed down a guy crouching perfectly still, the first bullet missed his head and hit the wall beside him, then next bullet went over his head and the third bullet hit him in the chest, I don't know how this happens, but it happens, and on a fairly regularly basis when first entering the game.

It's not all bad though, once the game settles down, things work a lot better and the increased damage is great for snipers like myself, it's just a shame that the early game actually suffers from this more than it benefits.

The new map is poorly designed and filled with terrible mechanical problems.

When Miramar got announced i was so happy, iv'e wanted a big urban map for as long as the game has been out, then I started to play it properly and realized i'd be kept waiting, while there are big towns in the map that can create some awesome gun fights, this is only usually ever at the start of the map or if you're lucky enough to get it in the closing circles, most of the time it's travelling between wide open, rocky, mountainous spaces with people hiding in cliffs and the small buildings that dot the landscape, one of the biggest complains about the original map Erangel, was that there were was too much open space, Miramar managed to triple this.

Driving has also become a nightmare on Miramar as there is next to no terrain smoothing, driving anything into the mountains or up hills is likely to see you flip and be stranded on a massive cliff with the only way to get down is to go back the way you came from, likewise since they've increase the skybox height it's very easy to miss time something and fall to your death, or glitch and rubber band into falling, it's not all bad but the map we were promised wasn't exactly given to us, there are still extremely useless parts in the map that no one really goes to that could of been used to make the towns even bigger.

The old 4X problem still exists and is even worse on this map, since it's extremely open and large, if you're running between towns in an open field without a 4x scope you're pretty much dead as people can be hundreds of meters away from you with a clean shot, I will say one thing positive for it though, when you do get a town circle, it's incredibly fun as non stop wars break out between hotel buildings with grenades flying everywhere and people trying to escape, I just wish they had of spent a little bit more time on this map and made it properly, a lot of the open world is pretty copy paste and desperately needs terrain smoothing to make it easier to travel.

In fixing bugs and glitches they've actually added more.

This is a weird one, in fixing some bugs they've actually made it worse and I really don't know how, vaulting has been a great addition to the game, but sometimes iv'e been launched into the sky when vaulting over something small, or driven into the ground to my death for no apparent reason, likewise cars have been "reworked" and now handle a lot worse and it's a lot easier to crash them into things and instantly explode, this happened to me on the old map where the car rolled on it's side and slammed into a destroyed truck, when the car flipped back up the tiniest bit of my roof clipped the end of the other truck and exploded.

While they've finally fixed things like the infinite reload and parachute glitches, they've instead been replaced mainly because of poor design choices, the new parachutes are great for landing on the ground, but trying to land on a small building can often kill you, there's a place on the old map in Pochinki that we call "The kebab shop" it's a 3 story building in the middle of the map next to a big cafe looking thing, usually we'd land on the first kebab shop, loot it, then jump on the roof and scour the area, since the patch we've had maybe 3 successful landings, due to the new parachute mechanics, it drops you when you're "close" to the ground, which on a roof can mean 3 or 4 meters, the amount of times iv'e gone to land on the roof only to be thrown across the map and insta killed is ridiculous.

It's not all bad but some basic bugs and glitches haven't been fixed but sadly more have been added for some reason with some ranging from small and inconvenient to large and game breaking, I just wish with all money they've made they had of hired a project manager and a quality tester before they release patches.

The game will probably never be in a release worthy state.

As it stands PUBG "release" version is at best a early beta, this probably should of been the Early Access portion of the game, after 11 months of "development" we're only slightly ahead in the game, i'd say roughly 60% at most of this game works as intended, but I think the problem here is the disconnect between the developers, the test server and the live server, anyone who has worked on video games before or in server maintenance knows that before your game can be considered stable, you have to continue breaking the game until you can't anymore.

PUBG never seemed to go this route because the game is actually stable, just not on the live version, in a closed server test environment the game would run fine, and on the public test servers the game also runs fine because there isn't anywhere near as much strain on the game to perform, when you have over a million players connected to your server at once you're going to have bugs and glitches that you need to test for ahead of time, Blizzard learned this the hard way through launch day on expansion releases and now they're pretty stable on release day.

Unfortunately for PUBG though, anything they do isn't ever going to "fix" the problem unless they rebuild the servers from scratch, the diminishing returns are now becoming pretty apparent the longer the game goes on, for every one thing they fix, seven break, they add quality of life changes to the game, they either don't work as intended or come with new bugs, recently Rainbow Six Siege went through "operation health" a patch cycle that fixed some very long standing problems with the game that have propelled it back into the spotlight, even at 11 months old, PUBG desperately needs to do this.

Like I said however, it seems that BlueHole has no desire to do this and the problems will more than likely just get worse as time goes on, I do love playing PUBG and have a lot of good memories in the game to this day it's just not enough now to keep me playing everyday when you have to not only face the players in the game, but the very game itself and hope that you're one of the lucky ones that doesn't get this glitches and bugs with a development team who seems to think that there's nothing wrong with the game and doesn't understand their playerbase.

Sadly I wouldn't recommend PUBG to anyone anymore since the game is now officially released and whatever development cycle they had will slow down even further, and the finished product is a broken laggy mess, but to each their own, while there are a lot of problems with the game, not everyone feels the same as me and i'll let you guys decide for yourself.

Thanks for taking to the time to read my review, if you enjoyed it, feel free to up-vote, resteem or follow me for more, what do you guys think of the release version of PUBG, is it release worthy or do you feel it could of used more time in development? let me know in the comments below and i'll get back to you, thanks guys!