The four best improvements to PUBG since launchLooking back on nine months of incremental improvementsPlayerunknown’s Battlegrounds launched into Steam’s Early Access program in March. Since then, the team at PUBG Corporation has effectively been building a rocketship while it lifts off of the launch pad. There have been technical hiccups, to be sure, but there’s also been some fantastic innovations.Here are the four best improvements made to the game in the last nine months, all of which will be included in this evening’s 1.0 update.THE NEW DESERT MAP, MIRAMARWhen Battlegrounds first arrived on the scene, the environment looked an awful lot like every other survival shooter. A relatively flat, post-apocalyptic, vaguely Eastern European setting with a mix of NATO and Warsaw Pact weapons lying around.Although it’s very purposefully built, with long sightlines and smatterings of dense, urban terrain, it’s also really weird.Why is there an isolated plateau in the middle of a corn field? Why is there a spot on the western edge of the map with a flooded inland bay full of half-submerged houses. And what’s up with those Greco Roman temple complexes? Who cares. Just go with it.Miramar changed the tone, though, and in many ways has given the game a wholly new and unique feel.Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene has said time and again that he owes his success to those who came before, specifically Dean Hall and his work on DayZ. Hall chose Chernarus, a “geotypical” landmass created by Bohemia Interactive, because of its scale — 225 square kilometers, with room enough for tank companies to do battle while jet fighters and attack helicopters duke it out overhead. Erangel, Battlegrounds’ original map, has the same kind of furniture scattered around, but it lacks that whole geotypical bit. It makes zero geologic sense.I’m not saying that Miramar is ripped from the pages of National Geographic, but it sure flows a lot better. Also, its scarcity of grass and bushes looks more attractive given the limitations of the game engine. Even more importantly, the buildings — which make visual sense when set against the terrain — offer more options for sniping positions and close-quarter battle scenarios. Its verticality, with massive buildings on opposite sides of the street in some places, plays to the strength of the game’s ballistic model.CLIMBING AND VAULTINGLike many first-person shooters, it’s pretty hard to suspend your disbelief once players start bunny hopping around the map. Even more problematic for Battlegrounds was the fact that players, who are asked to spend a large portion of their in-game time running at top speed toward the horizon, were regularly stopped cold by the humble chain link fence. Vaulting changes all that, and allows for fluid movement over obstructed terrain.But the developers went further. There’s an entire context-sensitive climbing system that allows players to make their way up onto the top of just about anything they can reach. It also grants them the ability to leap into or out of most of the windows in the game, meaning that being cornered in a ramshackle outbuilding is less of a problem than it used to be.
@PUBATTLEGROUNDSPlayers, the maintenance is over and PC 1.0 is finally here! We really hope you enjoy it. Please download the updated client if you haven't already. Thank you for waiting and thank you all for supporting us so generously. This is just the beginning! #ThisIsBattleRoyale1:01 PM - Dec 21, 2017 353 353 Replies 2,178 2,178 Retweets 6,789 6,789 likesTwitter Ads info and privacyLike clockwork, it crashed hard just a few hours later.It always takes a while for a large game update to propagate. Immediately after launch, the numbers on Steamcharts climbed slowly, but steadily. Around 5:00 a.m. EST there were one million players. A half-hour later, the number was closing in on 1.5 million. That’s when things started to get a little wacky.At launch, one of the first things that the Battlegrounds client does is connect to a server. I’m sure it’s checking on things like the clothes you own and how many credits you’ve got in the bank. But around 5:30 a.m. today, I just got a blank screen. No character, no HUD, just a windswept corner of Erzangel with a big hole in the middle of it where my avatar should be standing.After restarting the game several times, I finally got into a match, but with only about 10 other players in-game, the timer never started counting down to start the match. We were stuck there, all of us, in a kind of weird limbo. One player just ran off toward the horizon.This morning’s quick fix to solve Battlegrounds’ server issues was barely a blip compared to the longer maintenance window yesterday. SteamchartsBut, after a bit of work in the server room, it looks like everything is going smoothly for the team at PUBG Corp. The total player count is climbing, and should be over two million within the hour. By this evening, expect the game to come close to its all-time high of more than 2.9 million.As anticipated, the final 1.0 release includes climbing and vaulting and the new desert map Miramar. There are lots of small fixes to read about, however. You can find the complete patch notes on Steam.The Xbox One version of Battlegrounds is still in early access. No formal release date has been given.
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