The splendid Battle Royale ’em up PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] is to get a whole lot more agile with the addition of climbing and vaulting, creator Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene has revealed at E3. I am mighty excited about the prospect of leaping over fences, climbing up walls, rolling over cars, and diving through windows, as this clunkiness of obstacles has been a minor concern for me and I wasn’t sure quite what the plan was. Turns out, the answer is swish movement that should make gunfights more exciting. Have a look in this trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday is patch day in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] and voila, this week’s early access update is out right now. This is one of the smaller weekly patches, as opposed to the larger monthly patches which add new features, but its fixes and tweaks are still welcome. We’re getting minor improvements to server performance, minor client performance improvements in specific circumstances, and a few fixes. They’re nothing major but this is only one of the weekly patches. Read the rest of this entry »

Performance improvements, a fancy new silenced sniper rifle, and a motorbike able to pull sick stunts will hit PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] on Thursday in the second of the big monthly updates on its journey through early access. The update will also fix a problem making scopes imprecise, and brings balance tweaks including making the final two fightcircles slower. It sounds like a decent amount of progress towards the full launch of PUBG, or Pub-gee, or Pubat, or Plunkbat, or whatever it is we’re calling the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Performance improvements and new items have arrived in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] with today’s launch of the first monthly big patch for the chart-topping early access Battle Royale ’em up. Lucky scavengers might get to ride in a motorbike with a sidecar, gun down fellow survivors with the new Vector SMG (that fancy anime-lookin’ gun), and hopefully spend less time grumbling about framerates. Some players are reporting worse performance and more server problems since today’s patch, mind. Tch! Early access, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

Launching a multiplayer Battle Royale ’em up into early access is one thing but actually finishing it is quite another, one the genre’s leaders have struggled with. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] has done well with the initial launch, rocketing to the top of the Steam charts last week and comfortably becoming one of Steam’s most-played games — even if our Brendan didn’t dig it. And from here? The developers have laid out their plans for patches, which include daily and weekly fixes and monthly content updates. And yes, they are working on improving performance. Read the rest of this entry »

The funny thing about ‘Hunger Games’ and ‘Battle Royale’ games isn’t that they miss how awful those dystopian murdergames are, rather that they recreate the experience of the antagonists – those hated and feared few who relish the killing and thrive in murderland. They’re the Hunger Royale All-Stars, dozens of Kiriyamas and Catos thrown into murderlands where the would-be suicides and pacifists are already winnowed by not buying the game. The genre’s mighty popular these days — H1Z1: King of the Kill is the third most-played game on Steam — and today a new blooddrenched contender swaggers into the arena. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] has just entered early access, with some pedigree to its name. Read the rest of this entry »