Battlegrounds’ New Kill Cam Needs Some Work

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the kill-or-be-killed game where you often come away with only the vaguest notion of how you died, is finally getting a kill cam. That’s good news! PUBG, though, is a colossal cauldron of explosive strangeness, and the new kill cam is having trouble keeping up.

The kill cam is live alongside a host of other version 1.0 features on PUBG‘s test server, which is currently the 14th most popular game on Steam despite being a test server (sorry, Call of Duty: WWII). People dig the kill cam because it helps them learn from their mistakes and, on some rare occasions, catch hackers red-handed, speedhack-footed or aimbot-faced.

The thing is, the kill cam is inconsistent in ways that detract from your ability to understand what happened, and sometimes it can make people look like they’re hacking when they aren’t. This is because the kill cam doesn’t actually show you a recording of what happened, but instead recreates the moment based on data. This isn’t uncommon in video games, but PUBG‘s murder playground is especially large and complicated. This can lead to inconsistencies in physics and positioning, sometimes resulting in wholly different scenarios when the kill cam loops. Check out this especially egregious example from Nile:

The buggy takes different paths on successive plays, leading up to a moment where it just crashes into a barrier before the kill cam can run its course.

Then there are moments such as in this clip from James Berger, in which all 666 laws of gun physics are unceremoniously broken, but especially the one that reads “thou shalt only hit a dude by aiming at him and pulling the trigger”:

And who doesn’t love a bit of good old-fashioned land swimming, as seen in this perplexing kill cam clip from Jesse Hendrey:

Given the numerous other examples of the kill cam just not making any sense, this time-honoured competitive shooter tradition is clearly gonna need some adjustments before it fits gracefully into PUBG. On the upside, though, it has major potential, as evidenced by this moment of absolutely magnificent karma from Romeo L: