Playerunknown's Battlegrounds updates adds emotes
Carly Rae Jepsen can't be far behind
Tensions run high in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds but the emotions are simple: I would like to shoot you; I would prefer you not shoot me; oi oiiiiiii! These can be deduced by context but, for players who believe they have rich emotional lives which absolutely must be shared with everyone, the battle royale 'em up now has little emote animations. These carefully express emotions ranging from "I surrender; please do not shoot me" through "I am angry enough to shoot someone" and even "I could kiss you, you absolutely bloody legend." Today's update seems a good'un in general, bringing a lot of welcome fixes and quality-of-life tweaks.
The dozen emotes are Hello (a wave); Thanks (blowing a kiss); Affirmative (nodding your head); Clap (clapping and nodding a bit); Laugh (a belly-clutching, arm-pointing cackle); Surrender (putting your hands up); Rage (shaking your fists like an urchin just stole a pie from your windowsill); You're Done (drawing a hand across your threat); Negative (shaking your head); Provoke (doing the 'eye see you' finger-eyes followed by a pointing then beckoning finger); Come Here (a beckoning hand wave); and Go (pointing forwards). These are all done in eerie silence, like you're a terrible mime murderer pretending to experience emotions when really you're thinking about wearing my skin as a suit. Observe:
The devs say they plan to add more emotes later, which I assume will be packed into the crates of cosmetic items.
Beyond animations that are mostly useful for dicking about in the lobby and as a simple attention-grabbing focus for video game blogs, today's patch has brought some decent little changes. Here are a few highlights I've picked out:
- Improved real-time response by reducing input lag
- Mitigated the frame drop issue caused by the map loading process
- Added main menu voice chat
- Made holes in the ceiling and floor of some high buildings, so that it is easier to move between different levels, to improve the gameplay experience on Miramar
- Added 37 achievements on Steam
- Changed the gun scope view to be more realistic
- Increased the radius of explosion effect considering the actual effective radius
- Removed ambient noise and lowered the overall volume
- Implemented the Doppler effect for the airplane engine sound - the pitch of the airplane engine sound is now different depending on the distance and the direction of movement of the airplane
- Improved an issue where three-wheeled motorbikes would suddenly flip whenever the server performance deteriorated
- Mitigated an issue where when exiting the parachute mode, player could take excessive fall damage
- Fixed an issue where the adjusted zoom level in 8x scope reset after swapping to your other weapon(s)
The full patch notes are over here.
The achievements are mostly boring, challenging players to get certain numbers of kills and wins, but there are some fun ones like "Wear the outfit of a dead player", "Kill 10 players with the crossbow", "Get into a vehicle where an enemy player is already in". I'd like to see more of the cheevos encourage banter and antics, with daft challenges like big jumps, pub crawls... honestly, sometimes it's almost as if PUBG Corp forget they're making a stag & hen weekend simulator.
And yes, performance does seem fine. FPS and crash woes over the weekend were mostly caused by a wonky anti-cheat update that ended up being rolled back.
The devs have also now opened signups for early access to the game's upcoming API, which should allow for better stat-tracking sites and such.