Boughted, will be hopping on the discord tonight after grocery shopping
Getting tired of grinding D3 necros anyway :)
tonight we murder
Jon and I are playing, anyone want to join?
Review-bombing has dropped to game to “mixed” on Steam. For most complainers, the issue is that Brendan Greene said this back in May:
“We’re not doing monetization during early access, it’ll be afterwards.”
And the fact that Greene plans to not offer any free crates at all once they do launch out of EA, unlike many other games with loot crate systems.
But none of this seems to be slowing the rate of sales at all. They are now at around 6.5 million.
That’s pretty stupid since they also said they would test microtransactions before the full release. And since this is a limited sale, they’re pretty much sticking to their words.
Well, Greene admitted that his communication was unclear. “We’re not doing monetization during early access, it’ll be afterwards” is pretty cut and dried, so I can see why people get confused when paid crates are offered in EA.
It’s more interesting to me that there’s a lot of noise about it, but the majority of people obviously don’t care.
Squads is fun. Bring your Rambo pants!
I sold my Rambo pants for $4.
So, I fired this up for the first time last night. My musings:
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This is about as bare-bones of a game design as is possible and still have it be a game. It is this simplicity – which I do not ever think was deliberately engineered as it being stumbled upon in previous BR versions – which is the game’s strongest suit.
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In terms of presentation, I’d classify the game at a level of Unity store rip-off, except that it’s based on Unreal. This is no tightly-written, efficient machine … it’s a lurching collection of middleware, God Bless its indie heart.
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Whatever net-code they glued in struggles mightily. Then again, the poor thing is trying to track 98, uh 90, uh 54, no, 23 players noodling around at once.
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Movement and turning feels sluggish, more on a kin to ArmA, even though it’s not a Realistic Manshooter. Jumping is lollerific.
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It’s clear that the game’s simplicity and accessibility are going to draw the LCD like an infernal magnet. My first experience of the game was the lobby and some fuckwit shouting “CHINA NUMBAH ONE! CHINA NUMBAH ONE!” over and over again in his headset. I mean, over and over on a mentally-disabled level. I fear for our species. I had voice turned off before I even reconfigured my controls. 80% of the players’ handles were naughty variations on the word “penis” or the emissions thereof. I felt embarrassed that I stuck with Scharmers rather than choosing JIIZZZUMSPEWINGTWITCHINGCOCKMEAT69. So know what you’re getting into.
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It works, of course. You hop in, and, in my case, slink around for goodies, preparing yourself for the inevitable playfield contraction. If there’s one problem, it’s that this strategy is pretty much the Golden Path: I finished 5th on my very first game, with my only kill some poor fool who though he could jump me in a house. No, son, I saw the OTHER open door, which is why I switched to my shotty.
I think the kids are going to dig this one for a long, long time, on a CS level, in fact. As for me: well, I’d hit the fuckin thing with a)an experienced designer to clean up the games rough edges, and b)boatloads of cash to spitshine the presentation up. I think b) will happen, but it may take a while for BlueHole to admit it needs a).
CTRL+T is your friend. It mutes everyone else.
I actually set my own in-game voice to mute in the settings and then CTRL+T to turn local voice back on once I’ve jumped out of the plane, because sometimes you can then hear people over the proximity chat narrating themselves sneaking up on you.
Also, one of my favourite things in the game is how broken the vehicle physics can be and I hope they never fix it. What happens when two vehicles fall in love in this game is amazing.
Also, also… if anyone is on the fence, just watch this.
Yes it opens with someone using a saucepan as a controller. Don’t worry, it gets less serious from there.
For the shade I dumped on it, PUBG has that spark, despite the legion of failures, glitches, and oddities it has.
The first few games you play aren’t necessarily representative. There’s a matchmaking system, and at the default MMR the average opponent is pretty terrible. After a stats reset it feels like you can do whatever and end up in the top 10, but after half a dozen games it starts to get dramatically harder.
It’s hard to reliably collect your ideal loadout just by looting; but kill somebody mid-game and you’ll probably have your pick of weapon attachments and infinite meds.
Came here to post this. Thank you. :)
Tonight at 8pm PDT a friend is doing a Games Industry PUBG Tournament.
Should be a good mix of game devs / journos / other industry personalities. This is sort of the trial run for a larger tournament that is in the works for the near future. I will be streaming at twitch.tv/drjonez and I know Gary Whitta is also planning on streaming from his channel as well. Alex Navarro is supposed to be playing, not sure if he’ll be streaming/recording/etc. Will Smith, Anthony Gallegos, people from Iron Galaxy, the Dream Daddy devs, a ton of other folks that we randomly group up with for rounds… I even invited Tom Chick but he never directly responded to me about it ;)
Anyway. It should be fun. I plan on being full of fajitas and scotch and having a great freaking time :D
In any event, I just requested and received a refund for the game. It was interesting enough, and the core concept is good, but it’s so damn bare-bones right now, and I can see it becoming extremely repetitive very quickly.
Plus, to be honest, I’m not huge on the whole core streaming userbase that the game caters to.
The randomness keeps it pretty fresh really. Random loot, random plane path and where other people jump sort of dictate what places on the map you see along with the circle being random as well.
I personally love having a casual screw off shooter where it’s kind of riding the line between semi realistic and arcadey, but since there are so many random elements and it’s so insanely fast to get in a game that there’s no barrier to just fucking off and having fun.
Sure it’s fun to win and all, but considering I could die in the first minute or two by random chance I have no fear of just dropping into a crazy mess of people, or running off to some corner of the map just to explore or whatever.
That mix of the huge map and tons of people along with the unpredictable nature of it makes for some real memorable moments. Playing duos or squads with people is even more fun. When things go ridiculously wrong it is often more hilarious and fun than when they go to plan.
There are at least two more maps in the works, more guns, more vehicles along with the vaulting/climbing system, a 2d and 3d replay system and a more polished first person perspective. Honestly if those things are done well and they keep tightening up the all around client/server performance I can easily see playing this regularly for years.
Holy shit playing FPS solo is absolutely terrifying.
Kills are a bit easier too, as I feel like it evens the skill playing field a bit more.
I can see revisiting the game when this is all in place.