
Anyone caught outside takes damage over time, and has to migrate under pressure.

If you're blessed, successive safezones will seem to mirror your position. Every couple minutes, a new, smaller safezone is randomly declared, telescoping within the area of the previous one. PUBG's simplest system is also its most important. Hitting someone on the run at this distance convinces you you're the son of Neo and Robin Hood, gifted with precognition. Each shot across a long canyon or field is a parabolic prayer-the target might've shifted three feet by the time your shot travels 300 meters and burrows into the dust, kicking out a particle effect. My favorite phase in a match is about 10 minutes before the endgame, when anyone still alive is geared to the gills but the circle is big enough that engagements are happening through 4X and 8X scopes. These problems melt away at long range, where I think PUBG is at its best.

Our PUBG performance analysis has more details on hardware requirements if you're interested. Worst, PUBG's scale means that my framerate still occasionally dips by 20 fps at an inopportune moment, although hardware performance has improved tremendously since its early months. The shotguns are unpleasant, unreliable, and hard to read. But some ironsights, like that of the M416, are blocky and low-res. When you feed ammo to an empty AKM, your left arm reaches across your body to smack the charging handle, a nice detail. No attempt is made to explain the origin of the scary blue electric field, the setting, or why you're fighting to the death.Īnother gripe is that the level of visual polish varies a lot between the weapons. Footstep audio doesn't have enough fidelity to make hearing a reliable sense in all situations, making it hard to be certain whether someone's above or below you. Almost all surfaces are impenetrable, and some fences can't be shot through. Melee is clumsy and unreliable, relegated to desperation or taunting.

Unfortunately, it's indoors that some of the combat dynamics fall apart. The best areas of PUBG's two maps promote this stuff, like the school on Erangel, or Pecado and Hacienda Del Patrón on Miramar: sprawling compounds with hiding spots, escape holes, ambush perches, and other traps waiting to be sprung. And look, there's a vehicle parked at the bottom of the building-should you pop its tires to prevent a getaway, or keep it intact for your squad?ĭecisiveness is a skill, and PUBG is a platform for dumb schemes and accidental bravery.
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Do you pop a smoke grenade and run to revive them, or fight from where you're standing? Maybe your third teammate could put some suppression into the windows of the building while you rush in, but wait, you can't be sure how many friends this attacker might have. Your body armor is shot up and about to break. Say someone's ambushed you from a second-story window-they've tagged your friend, who's now incapacitated behind a tree and bleeding out. What's more gratifying about PUBG's gunfights to me is the ad-libbing and creativity it takes to manage the complex situations it puts you in. Luckily for those of us without divine aim, it isn't everything. Check Twitch on a weekday and you'll see CS:GO ex-pro Shroud at the top of the channel list, prefiring around cover and pulling off sick spray transfers. Guns have touchy, individualized recoil and bullet travel time. Damage is modeled differently across the body, limbs, and head. Despite its spacious maps, winning a team duel at short range takes about the same mixture of snap reflexes, aggression, stealth, and peeking ability you'd need on de_dust2. I also like that distributing duties among a three- or four-person squad is itself a skill: hand the scoped Kar-98 to your best shot, and the keys to the Dacia to your daredevil.

The breadth of verbs and micro-skills makes PUBG a richer experience over time because it always feels like there's another trick to learn about driving, vaulting, grenading, whatever. That doesn't undercut its status as a skillful shooter, with many merit badges to earn: cartography, looting, boating, tactical driving, parachuting, cross country, sieging, spotting, first aid, airdrop retrieval, boxing. The mindset PUBG cultivates in its players-let's call it 'casually competitive'-may be its biggest achievement. Most people I play with measure success by how much trouble they get into-whether your match generates a good Twitch clip, whether you were able to get revenge on the group that KO'd your friend, or whether you took the opportunity, in a kill-on-sight game, to backflip your motorcycle off a hill at the least appropriate moment. Despite PUBG's booming skirt economy, loot boxes are probably the last thing on your mind.
