Seems a good time to link this again.
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This reminds me of a game design discussion I kept coming back to about battle royale games with large maps.
I was convinced that the normal ways to manage different numbers of initial players waiting for a game weren’t good. Those include: fill up the server with bots, use smaller maps, long wait times for the lobby to fill.
What I wanted was a match on one of the big 8x8 maps, but have a dynamic first circle. If there are only 30 players? Show a smaller circle in one part of the map, and start the round with all the players closer together.
This allows for a lot of variety between games, and over time you’d get to visit all parts of the map. Should be great! No downsides!
A few years later, Super People actually implemented this.
AND IT SUCKS! Turns out my idea was terrible.
I didn’t realise that the best part about a big map wasn’t the variety of locations on the map, and that in different games you’d drop in different locations, and fight in different locations.
The best part is traveling BETWEEN the different locations. You drop in one town, and over the course of the game you have to traverse 4km, down roads, through forests, up mountains, off cliffs, etc, etc. Each one is both a traversal challenge, and each brings new possibilities of action, tension, ambushes, flipping the car, crashing a bike, being shot out of a glider, the list goes on.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and land in the location of the final circle. But you’re only “lucky” because you have less risk. You’re unlucky because that’s often the least interesting place on the map for the middle 15 minutes of the game.
What Super People has recreated is the least interesting form of PUBG! Drop into one town, have a fight… all good. But then, over the course of the match, you know you’re never going to have to run more than a few hundred meters, or 1km, at most to get to the final circle.
It doesn’t matter how many different unique locations there are on the map, because you’ll only ever see two of them per match, and the only route that makes sense between them is a straight line.
All I’m saying is: I’m glad the PUBG game devs didn’t do what I thought they should do.
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Yesterday I joined a friend for a duo game, and he was drinking and died early by getting run over. The normal plan at this point is to just get into fights as a solo, dying quickly and starting a new game as a duo again.
But this time I kept not dying when taking on other teams, and I kept not dying all the way until the end. My friend was observing, of course, but then my girlfriend came into the office to watch, so it felt like I had a proper audience. It really felt like a game worthy of a professional streamer’s highlights video.
And that’s why I keep coming back to PUBG. I know everyone has their lifestyle game, but this one’s mine, and it keeps giving me peak gaming experiences unlike any other game.
I think a 9 kill win is my highest ever kill count in a game where I won, and also there were no bots. I’ve got more kills and not won, and won with more kills on a bot-filled map. It’s cool that after 5 years playing I’m still breaking new ground.
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Thankfully PUBG is alive and well in Europe.
All of the points of the video stand up if you’re American, or playing in America. The real truth is that PUBG is huge in Asia, even if for a lot of people the PC version only exists to lend legitimacy to the mobile game. I recently saw some stats about 100 million monthly active players in China.
Plenty of games are developed for an American market, but PUBG is made in Korea. The Sanhock map features Chinese weapons, and is super popular in China. The new map coming out next week, Rondo, is blatantly a Chinese map too. The esports events are only in Asia, or where the time zones make sense for the Asian market
It doesn’t matter if there are other more-popular games in the same genre, if you can keep millions of players active, you can keep plugging away at developing the game profitably.
For PUBG, the American market is maybe 2-3% of the player base. The profit is in Asia generally and China specifically, so PUBG can leave the American profits to Call of Duty and Fortnite and the like.
As I recall the merger of the US and Asia server playerbase was the nail in the coffin for my playgroup in America, but I agree with most of his points about the map design and monetization shifts. It was a very unique experience and it watered that down chasing after its competitors that eclipsed it (businesswise).
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How can US and Asia play on the same servers? The lag would be crazy.
Anecdotally, I was just out researching a new gaming monitor purchase, and Samsung is using PUBG to promote its crazy big screen. It is indeed very big and very crazy, and almost completely impractical.
PUBG in 4K and 43 inches HDR and 144fps would be sweet though.
Sorry the servers weren’t officially merged now that I looked it up again, but there was an extremely high level of Chinese and other SE Asian players on the NA servers that it became a major issue. Depending on the netcode architecture bad ping isnt a strict negative (sometimes if its player centric, it can even favor the lagging player).
I’ve played on Euro servers for certain FPS games (I’m in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and its been doable even with 100+ pings it just kinda depends on the game and the type of weapon you are using.
Yeah, you can get used to lag, and compensate for it in a lot of FPS and shooter games. Some places - like, obviously, here - you’ve often just gotta take it as a fact of life, that’s just how it be. I’ve played a lotta PUBG back in the day - albeit not as much as Luke, but enough - with American friends at 150-200 ping, it’s certainly doable. I’d even play with my mate in Ireland sometimes on euro servers, but we did have to pick our time of day there a bit.
And as an added benefit, when you’re playing on more local servers(or travel to the servers, either way), it’s like goku taking off the weighted clothes, which can be fun.
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I can’t help but remember times back in the day playing some fps’ on 56k or DSL, running around with, at best, a 100ms-200ms ping.
I know, very, I walked to school up hill both ways, but it’s certainly doable.
Tribes ][ was actually worked impressively well with a 56K modem. Obviously still a high ping, but actually playable.