PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is, without a doubt, the breakout hit of the year. It’s sold more than 15 million copies and is the most popular game on Steam by a country mile (full of people trying to kill each other). All this, and it’s still in Early Access. You’d think it has a bright future ahead of it, but a growing number of players aren’t so sure.
No competitive Early Access game has ever gotten this popular this quickly, nor have any had to scale up their operations so rapidly to account for a player influx of this scale. This has caused some serious growing pains for PUBG, and even folks who butter their bread with PlayerUnknown’s ButterKnife can’t help but rub their temples in barely restrained fury at the current state of the game.
Here’s popular streamer Dr Disrespect going off on the game after an especially rocky session.
“It’s just a f**kfest of desync and lag,” he said. “We’re getting real close to never playing this game again, deleting it, and laughing at this developer group if they ever try to bring out new content.”
Dr Disrespect, who used to work at Activision, added that if a game he was working on there ever performed so poorly during a playtest, they’d have pulled the plug on the test and poured every available resource into smoothing out the experience.
It’s not just public figures like The Doc, though. While players still love the game’s core premise of 100 people at the end of the earth fighting a war over the final chicken dinner after the planet’s remaining resources were processed into energy drinks [citation needed], some are fed up with elements of its execution.
This stems primarily from an influx of hackers, as well as ongoing issues with server connectivity and general glitchiness, all as the game zeroes in on an official version 1.0 “release” that’s still slated for later this year.
In the past 30 days, Steam reviews of the game have been only 37 per cent positive, or “mostly negative” by Steam’s metrics.
Granted, a portion of these come from a review bomb over advertisements that happened at the beginning of the month, but recent weeks have also seen a flood of reviews complaining about hackers, lag, performance issues, physics problems, unreliable gunplay, and other bugs.
Nearly 5000 negative reviews have been posted today alone.
Developer Bluehole seems to be plugging away on better anti-cheat measures, though it’s tough to say when those will bear fruit.
Visiting the game’s most popular discussion boards, you get a sense of exasperated fatigue, with many on Reddit and the game’s Steam forums fearing that PUBG is destined to go the way of DayZ, both with regards to glitches and a lack of meaningful updates to the game.
“I enjoy the game, but the times I have died because of poor optimization, bad netcode, bugs and other fixable stuff is just infuriating,” said a player named _I_Have_Opinions_ on the PUBG subreddit. “Another big problem is how Bluehole keeps promising stuff and seems to be pushing for 1.0 this year (which the game is not ready for). For how long has vaulting [over obstacles] been ‘just a patch’ away?”
For now, Bluehole is stuck in the middle, surrounded on all sides by factions they will never be able to fully please. Players can’t even agree on what exactly they want when version 1.0 is officially released: Some are looking for a single map that’s super-polished, but others are champing hard at the bit for More Content, even if it’s less perfect.
In that respect, PUBG is an accurate reflection of real life: we can’t all be winners.
Comments
20 responses to “As Version 1.0 Approaches, PUBG Is Having Some Growing Pains”
I’m always an optimist – whenever I die to a lucky shot I always like to err on the side of “ah well – I obviously dun goofed”.
Two incidents recently have really highlighted the hacking problems though.
1 – Where my team watched a single username/player amassing kills at a scarey rate before hearing the gunfire get closer and closer before.. you guessed it getting cleaned up by the same shooter that we couldn’t see..
2 – I was playing a in a team with randoms where we managed to clear out the local town of three other teams, I was feeling pretty good about that (I got 4 kills myself) until I expressed in team chat how well we’d done and one of the randoms casually dropped “oh im hacking too”… for the next 15mins I tried to get inside hit head and workout why he was hacking.. In the end I decided he was just a bored 14 year old 🙁
This is within the last week – I feel a little late to the party but for a game that shows so much promise it seems to be failing in some basic areas…
The hackers are getting a bit much, but the latency is only an issue sometimes for me playing on Aussie servers. Some hackers try to hide their advantages but others are blatant and you will be copping auto-aim fire from half a click away while you are behind cover.
Got too big for its britches?
why most we keep reporting steam-review-bombing as news? or disenfranchised gamers who overreact at the first hint of trouble?
these are about as common, sadly, days of the week that end in d, a, y.
These reviews don’t look like people over-reacting at the first hint of trouble, these look like people who have been putting up with issues for hundreds of hours and have finally reached the point where its more annoying than fun.
I don’t get why people cant criticise a game without being called whingers or entitled these days. If you are so annoyed by this kind of article then you don’t have to click on it but people whinging about games can often lead to the improvement of a game.
note the term ‘review bomb advertisements’, that is not just honest people people writing honest feedback that is a digital Hammer Horror lynch mob with digital pitchforks and flames.
Some gamers really dont understand what they got themselves in for was a Early Access game, not a retail one. So of course there are going to be all sorts of issues, especially terms of scaling. (how do they upgrade their tech and staff to match the type of numbers they are getting without serious money). Then again we live in an age where some gamers dont even understand the difference between a beta and a full game.
The reason why ‘entitled’ gets thrown around so much is because some gamers seriously have no idea that when they buy into a game, game devs owe them absolutely nothing beyond the game itself. They dont need to communicate. They dont need to listen to feedback. They dont need to make the game players want. a Sure good companies do but they arent required to. Just this week and last people over at Destiny 2 were calling for the Bungie boss to be fired because his company dare to not make the game those particularly sad people wanted. Lets put that another way. If you are calling for someone to be fired because they made a form of entertainment doesnt entertain you personally… that is entitlement.
Sure game devs are bound to make sure their game works, but this is an early access, all this is as predictable as anything.
Just curious, Would you call the PC owners of Batman Arkham knight “entitled” for being pissed off at recieving a broken mess that didnt work?
Except PUBG does work as advertised. They have a big disclaimer on first launch telling you that it’s early access and expect bugs etc etc.
Do I need to dignify that with an answer? Things like that and Assassin’s Creed Unity are those special cases that were so fundamentally broken in so many ways, they are the go-to, that some ALWAYS bring up to try and disprove a point. They are like the Godwin’s Law of gaming.
Yes but you are basically saying gamers arent allowed to complain about something they paid for at all.
By your own logic i could say you can whine about not getting Mass Effect Andromeda DLC because you got the game and demanding DLC is you being entitled.
that is not at all what I am saying, but merely the complaints coming from gamers is far more likely to be completely out of scale with the crimes, or the reality of the situation. For all the early access games I have been part of so many of those playing have no idea that there is a difference between early access and retail product.
I have never said that about ME:A. I was disappointed by hysterical customers (who didnt what for reviews and the like, before they bought the game) deciding to thoroughly tank the game via steam reviews and the like, because the game they bought for entertainment didnt entertain them, which lead to the game being cancelled, ruining the fun of the people who were getting entertainment out of their purchase. If I dont like a game, or devs arent giving the support my unattainable expectations set, I leave. Find something else. Put that game in my pile of shame. I dont scream the house down for devs to be sacked like they do over Destiny 2 reddit.
Constructive feedback is one thing, but everything becomes part of grand conspiracies in which devs hate them and they dont play their own games and the devs should be sack etc. That’s when gamers cross into the land of ‘entitlement’.
Look, Im not disputing that some sections of the community go waaaaaaay over the top over what seems to be small issues (Looking at you people who got outraged over that tracer pose), But the way you word some of your comments its like you think people arent allowed to complain about a product they have paid for.
I complain about things i have paid for, I complain a lot about World of Warcraft for example. But those complaints dont come from a hatred of the game, They come from my love of the game and wanting it to be better.
You dont improve a game by ignoring any and all feedback. Given that PUBG is in beta AFAIK, Feedback is what they want from people who own the game. How can they fix issues if people never raise them?
You want to do that? fine, All the more to you. But people raising their voices is what gets devs to change. Look at Battlefront 2 for example recently, If not for the loud outrage over the lootboxes system, It would not have been changed.
Another example, Forza 7 VIP. If not for owners of the game being pissed off at Turn 10 for ruining VIP and making it a waste of money, Turn 10 would not have fixed it.
You want to be silent? All the more to you, But those devs wont fix the problems unless you tell them what the problems are.
And now you are generalizing gamers based on a loudmouth minority. If you look at the destiny 2 reddit for example those windowlickers chucking a sook number at a couple hundred at most. Destiny 2 has sold millions of copies.
Wether or not you dont like the feedback, If you purchase a product you have the right to give feedback on that product. It would be like me going to a restraunt and getting served a bad meal and the owner saying “You still got your meal, You’re not allowed to complain”
Stop only exposing yourself to the windowlickers of the internet, Its clouded your vision to think all gamers are like that.
Dude, the game has been in early access for ages. The story above shows comments from gamers who have invested significant time into this game showing clearly they were there from early days.
The comments literally say that they are upset about features promised but never delivered. Bugs identified early, but still not fixed. Not the state of the game when they started. Obviously it was good enough to put 800+ hours in.
Get off your high horse and realize that you’re not better, nor more intelligent than anyone else. The people complaining have good reason to do so.
it is still early access, it doesnt matter how long it has been or the hours you have put in. YOU still chose to buy in during early access.
everything that happens during such time will always be in a state of flux. Buyer beware.
That is an entitled whinger.
“We’re getting real close to never playing this game again, deleting it, and laughing at this developer group if they ever try to bring out new content.”
What a perfectly mature mindset.
I like how they play for hundreds of hours THEN give it a bad review for being bad. It’s like buddy, you’ve got how many hours of entertainment out of not a lot of money in the end. Why not go to the movies and then write bad reviews about a movie because you feel like you paid for 5 hours worth of content but the movie was only 2 hours long.
Not to mention that this particular guy is one of the biggest streamers of PUBG, an already particularly large game, so he’s probably already made a bit off of it in twitch ads.
I’ll forgive most of PUBG’s problems, as it is Early Access. However, the amount of hackers has become atrocious.
How long can a game get away with being called ‘early access’.
As long as its not in a retail release, I couldn’t really care what they slap the game with to be honest.