Player Unknown Battleground Guide

At the start of every Battlegrounds’ match, 100 players (either fighting in a free-for-all, teamed up in pairs, or assembled in four person squads) leap from the cargo hold of an airplane and parachute down into a massive map of cities, ruins, camps, and wilderness. All they need to do to win is survive. Surviving colors everything that follows. As players gather weapons and loot from around the map, they start killing each other. Some choose to hide in lone shacks or rush off into the wasteland. Some take to major cities and immediately open fire on whoever they see. To ensure players face off, a circle forms on the map. Players outside the circle take damage, and the circle shrinks at regular intervals until it is smaller and smaller. There is no hiding in Battlegrounds, not forever. If you are playing, you will be forced to meet another player. You will have to decide what to do in order to survive.Gunplay in Battlegrounds models itself after hardcore military simulation games. Each weapon has a unique shot pattern, recoil, reload time, and potential modifications. Combat demands focus; controlling your bursts, leading your aim, and taking time to find the right position are essential to success. While it is initially daunting, time and experience turn players into hardened e-warriors who react naturally to the needs of each new gunfight. Battlegrounds’ more realistic aspirations never come to pass.

It has the veneer of simulation but the sensibilities of an arcade. Scopes, magazines, and attachments feel more like powerups than pieces of tactical gear, and the raw chaos of each fight means that Battlegrounds feels less like 100-man SOCOM and more like a Contra deathmatch, with swathes of bullets pinging the landscape. It never quite feels right to pull a trigger in Battlegrounds-guns are always a little lighter to control than the beefy sound design implies-and while that sense of unpredictability is crucial to creating tension, it occasionally robs the experience of focus. Battlegrounds is always on the edge of live-fire exercise and a child’s game of cops and robbers, and it never reconciles those disparate halves into a cohesive whole.
You know what's a great idea? Stuffing 100 players into a plane to parachute down onto a desolate island to scavenge for weapons, armor, and supplies in hopes of surviving a bloody deathmatch. And to keep things interesting as numbers dwindle, throw in the impending doom of an electric field that forces players into an ever-shrinking warzone. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds turns this foreboding gameplay concept into an exhilarating multiplayer shooter. With several randomized variables that challenge you to adapt, no two matches are the same, and it's what keeps you coming back for more. It's not the first of its kind, and despite glaring flaws, PUBG emerges as the most accessible, mechanically refined battle royale game to date.

Whether solo or with a squad of other players, the early phase of a match is filled with tense anticipation. Dropping out of an aircraft with just the clothes on your back, you're expected to loot for weapons, ammo, armor, and health packs. These critical items litter the city centers, towns, and abandoned structures across the game's two different maps. You have to account for the plane's flight path and determine if you want to pick a fight as soon as possible; if so, it's a race to find the first gun or immediately throw hands in a hilariously janky boxing match. On the flip side, parachuting to a more distant town results in a less stressful hunt for items; either way, you won't always get the gear you want. In squads, sharing an abundance of ammo and health packs or helping scout for a vehicle highlights the tactical advantage of team play in the opening minutes.After working through the hectic opening of a match, you then have to face the dread of engaging others while also keeping an eye on the slow yet ominous "blue circle of death" that forces players into an increasingly smaller zone. It gives you time to scavenge regardless of the area you land in, but the random nature of where the circle converges within a huge map ensures that no one strategy can be employed repeatedly. Whereas capture zones and specific choke points dictate the action in many shooters, PUBG leverages simple variables to stave off monotony.

You never know where the final firefight will take place, or which position will be most advantageous when things heat up, until the blue zone comes into view. One match could have the last 10 players fighting on the open shores and in between rock formations, and the next one could turn into a stalemate between squads holed up in buildings. Miramar, the newer desert map, showcases the evolution of PUBG with its more varied terrain, newfound verticality, and quirky touches to city interiors (like a luchador wrestling ring and a casino floor). Regardless of the map, the same rules and tactics apply, and it's up to you to adapt to the given environment. Positioning, scouting, and knowing when to engage are vital to success; these are tenets that feed into the emergent tactics formed in the matter of seconds that separate life and death, especially when playing in groups. Imagine a skirmish against another squad across a crowded city. 

Spotting enemy movement presents an opening for a kill that'll turn the tide, but taking action puts you in potential danger. So do you pursue the enemy and brace for bullets raining down on you, or fire from afar and give your position away? If you take enough damage and get knocked down, teammates can revive you before you bleed out, but they'd be defenseless as the revive countdown ticks. PUBG is a series of calculated risks in the form of a shooter, and the unpredictability of where or when these moments happen keeps the game fresh. A few hours into Battlegrounds, you get the sneaking sensation that everything, even the smallest detail, has a purpose. For example, every door is closed when a match begins, so doors exist as doors, but when spotted open, also serve as warnings that you aren’t the first person to arrive at a home. Military bases and cities house powerful weapons, but that attracts more players, and thus more conflict. For a time, high-level players began to memorize the direction in which cars would be parked by default, so they could tell an untouched vehicle from a honeypot. The more you play, the more you learn how to speak Battlegrounds.The combo progression and regression, construction and destruction, total success and total failure gets at some deep existential pleasure, like rubber bands gradually being wrapped around a watermelon until it explodes. Battlegrounds never feels safe, because at any moment your hard work can be obliterated by a fearless newbie driving a buggy directly into your would-be hideout. Across a hundred hours of play, I’m most ashamed of the number of times somebody accidentally ran me over while I laid prone in a supposedly safe sniping perch.

The true secret to Battlegrounds success rest outside of the firefights, in the game world itself. Knowing where to be and how to get there is far more important than understanding how to properly fire a weapon. Learning each map means understanding exactly what stands between two cities, knowing the densest forest to find cover in, and deciding the best direction to push an encamped position. The game’s default map of Erangel is a mix of dilapidated Eastern European houses and forest glades. It requires slow, methodical movement. Play long enough and you’ll know which divot is the best to hide in outside of Mylta power plant or which the trees south of Pochinki cast the perfect shadows. Conversely, the newly-added desert map of Miramar demands a faster pace. You’ll learn that slightly to the south of the cemetery is a ridge that overlooks the city of Pecado that is perfect for scouting before you move in and that some of the best loot in city isn’t in the gym but actually in the gutters. 

The appeal of Battlegrounds’ maps isn’t just that they offer diverse battlefields to fight on, but that they also offer land and space to know just as comfortably as your neighborhood.As you understand the world around you, you become aware of the various changes that signal another player’s passing. Half-emptied piles of loot, a door left open, a smattering of boxes that showcase where dead bodies left their gear, and most importantly a footfall sounding in your ear. Battlegrounds demands a intimate sense of place, and while the thrill of surviving a gunfight is intoxicating, examination reveals that map knowledge and awareness win fights long before the first bullet is even fired. The real beauty comes from the long game and its devious sequence of leap-frogging movement, pauses to identify the direction of distant gunfire, and strategic placement within or even outside the dreaded player-damaging circle. Battlegrounds’ maps are not as bright or vibrant as other game worlds’, but they demand a player’s attention unlike any other.Battlegrounds is a tremendous game, but its technical problems threaten to ruin the experience. Server stability remains a major issue, with players rubberbanding and teleporting back to their previous locations as their movements are not properly read by the server. Disconnections and lag spikes are common, separating squads and interrupting battle. In early access, these random bouts of technical absurdity could be written off as occasionally funny byproducts of a developing game. Now that the game is released they feel particularly invasive, popping up at the most inopportune moments to break the flow of gameplay. Sillier glitches like cars launching into the air are charming, but it’s another matter altogether when it takes multiple attempts for a team to join a match without one of them getting lost in the ether. In the most dramatic cases, servers shut off entirely or are taken offline for unscheduled maintenance, prompting yet another apology from the game’s official Twitter account. Throughout development, Battlegrounds has added numerous features. There is a robust replay mode, the ability to climb and vault over obstacles, and more. The one thing that hasn’t materialized is a game that can be played reliably.