Playerunknown's Battlegrounds fixes Sanhok glitches, but wider tech improvements still coming
While Fortnite is intentionally creating holes in its world, this week the handymen of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds are patching up accidental holes. The latest patch is bringing fixes for several irksome spots on new map Sanhok where dastardly players could creep under the ground or inside rocks to hide and even shoot out unseen. As for bigger fixes the game could still use, particularly to improve server performance and weirdness with hit detection, the wait continues. There is hope. Head chef Brendan "Plunk" Greene recently said that developers PUBG Corp are "refactoring" parts, rewriting gameguts to replace hasty fixes with permanent--and neater--improvements.
Update #17 hit the test client this morning, which means it should be live on the main client within a day or two - unless something goes terribly wrong. A lot of its focus is on Sanhok. It pretties up the Ruins area with decorative new bells, mossy rubble, and a rockhat for the main palace. Cliffs and rocks across the map are reworked and prettied-up. And, most importantly, the patch notes say: "Fixed an issue where some terrain in Sanhok could be passed through."
A number of glitchy areas of Sanhok have let players inside. Take these rocks, which let a whole team hide inside while still shooting out (as captured by Michael Sam).
Or this patch of dirt, where "niKlaS" could go prone and hide inside.
Deary me. Some other spots and rocks have made players wonk out and fall through the terrain too.
The patch also has a nice touch for players on less-populated servers: "When matchmaking, the game will now display an estimated wait time for finding a match."
As for bigger improvements... I seem to be luckier than many when it comes to this, but the game definitely has problems with players and violence feeling laggy. When the combat is so deadly, one dead-on shot hitting air or one serverburp can kill you - a real bummer in rounds which can run to a half-hour. Especially when sometimes a killer shot won't seem to hit you until a second or so after it's fired, when you can't even see the shooter then collapse ('desync' problems far more pronounced here than typical lag compensation quirks in multiplayer FPSs). Great sources of frustration, those.
PUBG Corp are still working on the gameguts, mind, and there are no quick fixes. Brendan Greene spoke about a "long-term plan" to improve the foundations in an ESL interview posted on Sunday.
"We've had some slip-ups along the way," he admitted. "At the moment we're refactoring a lot of the code to try to peel off some of the bandaids we had to fix, and try to do it properly." Trying to rebuild parts of the game from the inside is not glamorous, it's not fast, but it is important for the game's long-term future.
"We're just trying to slowly optimise and improve the game but in order to do that we sometimes break the game," he explained. "Because refactoring, just... it's the way it works." He added that, sometimes, "You fix one thing and it breaks 20 others."
Fingers crossed for those eventual results.