But that ignores the obvious fact: Battlegrounds works as entertainment.
Critics and fans have speculated on how PUBG will operate as an esport, whether or not its pacing works for competitive play. Anybody can easily learn to read this game, to watch it, to spot the tension and excitement and drama. It isn’t accessible for every player, but it’s understandable. But games that upend established genres or inspire entirely new ones teach new languages, which in turn get polished, contorted and improved upon by future games.īattlegrounds is the refinement of a new language of play, but what may earn it a spot in the video game canon is that conceptual efficiency. Many games rely on the familiar language of games - red barrels explode, blinking red spots on an enemy mark its vulnerability - only introducing a few new phrases of play along the way.
Unlike most popular literature and films, most video games teach you how to read them, which is to say they’re as much about the content as how you experience that content. Though it’s perpetually rough, you get the sense while playing Battlegrounds, both in March and today, that the developers are constructing the game from a blueprint found only in Greene’s own mind. That the most substantial updates have been improved server performance, vaulting and car horns speaks to the confidence Greene and his squad have in the game’s foundation.Īnd they should feel confident. 20, its creators have had nine months to repair, polish and expand on their baby. From its early access launch on March 23 to its official launch today, Dec. Because every player knows intimately the effort that goes into building a kit of weapons and armor, they too know the sweet joy of ending someone’s game, concluding their 15 or 20 minutes of raiding with a damp thwack to the skull at the last moment.īattlegrounds on Xbox mixes fury with euphoriaīattlegrounds manages to exist within the crowded shooter genre in an unfinished state, and feel both fresh and creatively complete. Smashed Lego sets, controlled demolition, a player who’s collected the best weapons and armor getting pummeled with a frying pan. We humans like watching things that took time to construct be cooly extinguished. Of course, construction inspires destruction. Each round has a sense of progress, of growth, of construction. But like a procedural crime drama, PUBG always hits those same three key beats: Land on the island, gear up, survive to the end. That’s the trick of Battlegrounds: a simple arc that - based on the aggressiveness of players, the randomness of weaponry and the spot in which the circle ultimately closes - can play out in nearly infinite ways, depending on how you read the situation from one second to the next. Whether the player is sniping from a distant cliff, going house to house with a shotgun or simply hiding in the brush, the number of survivors will inevitably tick down as the blue circle pushes them into a spot like a giant trash compactor of conflict.Ĭompared to its predecessors, Battlegrounds is refreshingly accessible Players float onto an island, raid vaguely Eastern European towns or dusty ramshackle forts for randomized gear, and stay within the confines of an electric blue circle that slowly shrinks the map from miles of open terrain to a single square foot, forcing all survivors into the limited safe space.Īlong the way to the center of the circle, the player eliminates the competition - or allows it to fight amongst itself. Newcomers who don’t religiously monitor video game trends can grok the beginning, middle and end of their first match.
The game is aesthetically bland and prone to technical hiccups, but compared to its battle royale-inspired predecessors - a few Arma mods and H1Z1 - Battlegrounds is refreshingly accessible. Where contemporaries polish the graphical and technical edges of an established formula through iteration after iteration, Greene has been honing the very formula itself.
An unoriginal idea executed in an original fashion: That’s the merit of Battlegrounds.īattlegrounds is the culmination of years of genre experimentation by designer Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, colloquially known as PUBG (pronounced pub-gee), is if nothing else conceptually efficient.