Still shaking now! I think it’s my fourth dinner, but the others have been Duo or Squad, so finally ticked the solo win off the list. First person too.
I had really good positioning towards the final circle and with three left, when I had to move, I was able to move unseen to a prime location while the other two were engaged. The rest is history.
OK, I just got #2 in my first day playing, and the way I did it is kind of lame. Overall there are some things this game does extraordinarily well, and I can see why it’s so popular:
the sense of apocalypse is overwhelming. You airdrop into this empty island, full of buildings and weapons but no life. It’s one of the best zombie games I’ve ever played, and there are no zombies! We all knew the humans were the real enemy anyway, right? If you haven’t played this @tomchick you should. It’s the best zombie game without zombies ever!
you wander this abandoned, desolate wasteland, scavenging for weapons and armor, while hearing the occasional pak-pak-pak of gunfire off in the distance. Or maybe it was closer?
a huge airplane occasionally roars overhead, impassive, sometimes dropping supplies to fight over.
airstrikes randomly target areas on the map, masking footfalls and raining arbitrary terror.
the dread of never knowing when another of the 100 players on this enormous island is gonna suddenly show up around the corner, is intense. You crank the volume and footfalls are a constant implied threat. Did I hear one, or was that just me?
the terrordome areas are always shrinking, always impending, in an ever narrowing cone, forcing the survivors closer and closer together.
Anyway, the existential thrill is incredible. That alone is enough to explain the popularity of the game. It’s really something.
However, about that gameplay… it’s basically never in your best interests to engage anyone. Once you’ve scavenged “good enough” stuff, you’re as equipped as anyone is going to be, and your best bet is to hide out near where you think the epicenter of the map will end up, let the others finish each other off, and ambush anyone unfortunate enough to get in your line of fire.
That’s… fuckin’ boring.
And that’s how I got #2. I killled a dude on an airplane crate after he killed someone, got the M249 (I also had the Kriss Vector, which is pretty sweet, but when do you ever have the chance to really use more than one weapon in this game?), and hunkered down near where I thought the center of the map would end up being; the first 1-2 circles were already drawn.
I was literally alt-tabbing away from the game to read strategy guides while I was playing the game. For like 10+ minutes. And I got second. I also opened that game by punching a man to death with my bare hands, so that was pretty cool.
I dunno, this gameplay has massive potential, but it really needs some tweaks to be more engaging. Maybe squads is where it’s at? The solo 100 player maps end up feeling either random, as in whoops-that-guy-happened-to-be-right-there-sucks-to-be-you, or a campfest if you’re actually trying in earnest to win. It feels like it should be more.
Ok yeah squads is a shitload better.
Sounds like you had a couple of good runs both in regards to drops and circles.
The only way to reliably get good gear (particularly level 3 armour and helmet, optics, suppressors, and sufficient meds and boosters), is to engage during mid-game. You can certainly win with lucky circle placement, but once in the final 10, more often than not the better equipped players will win as they have more sustain. Suppressors in general are also extremely valuable.
Once you get a feel for the strategy, you will find a use for your two weapons. For example, at end-game a 4x scope becomes a liability because the engagement range can be short, so a second rifle with red dot will be more effective. Sniper rifles are very powerful, particularly with attachments, but again suffer at shorter range. Shotguns are great in early game and for house clears where one good shot will down an enemy. A fully equipped UMP is a thing of beauty (and SMG suppressors are much more common than for sniper or AR’s). A suppressed pistol is great for silently wrecking tyres of vehicles you don’t need. etc, etc.
Duo and Squad are indeed very different and tend to be more proactive games.
This is lame, but I actually can’t figure out how to aim down scopes in traditional FPS (zoomed) style. I’ve tried a ton of keys…
Holding right click will keep you in 3rd person, just zoom your view slightly. Clicking right click will put you into ADS proper. Should be configurable to your preference as well, I think.
Haha wow I was not getting that at all! Click vs click-and-hold.
I actually hate going to the middle early on for two reasons:
Another strategy, which I prefer, is to play the circle, where I find a vehicle and get far away from the flight path and just move with the circle ensuring that at least I have my back free. There are usually some others thinking the same way, so you’ll have some encounters but at least it’ll be manageable. And, more importantly, you have to stay alert the whole round.
I tend to play mostly duo or squad these days, but we usually apply that strategy there too. In squad, in particular, you’ll have a huge advantage if most of your squad is alive in the end game. Or, to be more precise, if you’ve lost a couple of persons, you’ll have a huge disadvantage. And you usually end up with casualties if you have prolonged firefights mid game.
Dropping in the middle, getting some lucky circles, and camping is boring, yeah. Avoiding players and going in with the edge of the circle is more tense and still effective for getting to the top 10, but also pretty slow.
I’m a little skeptical of the loot game too. I get the roguelike aspect of it. And if you jump near other players, then the tension of listening for them or being surprised is pretty high. But if you drop far away or drive to a deserted location, then you’re just playing a hidden object time management game.
It’s a weird game that falls in a weird space between a long, drawn-out game like DayZ, and a short deathmatch game with simple tactics like Battlefield. I’m still compelled to play it because it’s a unique experience. I just think the joy per hour is pretty low. (Joy is the wrong word since it’s not a “fun” game in the traditional sense, but you know what I mean.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tweaks the formula to become more consistently interesting. Heck, I wouldn’t mind a version of this game that gave you random / decent weapons (with certain pieces of gear missing in a deliberate way to encourage you to engage other players) with 20 people left alive in a mid-size circle.
I haven’t made my final thoughts because I’m still playing solos in a boring tryhard way. Duos seem the most fun for me though: the teams move around more instead of camping in solo, but there aren’t so many people that it’s difficult to gear everyone up, and the team sizes are small enough that you feel safe to engage immediately without worrying about where the other 2 or 3 squad members are.
Heh, yeah when my son and I play duo it is kind of a tug-o-war - he wants to head to some action and I want to keep out of the fray until the end.
Here is my basic approach:
Drop in a small, isolated cluster of buildings away from other players in order to get some basic equipment
Find a vehicle and drive to a place in the 1st/2nd circle that is the furthest from the path of the initial plane drop
Before the next constriction, try to upgrade my kit
Keep on the edge on the circle as much as possible, again as far from the initial plane path so I do not need to spend much focus on what is behind me and can concentrate on the middle of the circle
Ideally, I don’t even come across, let alone engage, another player until there are only about 20-30 left. To many that may be boring, but the beginning part of the game, consisting of scavenging, positioning, assessing and stalking is just as exciting to me as the actual gun fights.
However, when I play with my son, it is always “Let’s go School or Prison!”
Next time you play, hit me up and we’ll play doubles or squads
In my group we alternate team leaders each round, so everyone gets to lead with their preferred play-style, making decisions on drop locations, circle management and engagement strategy. Of course, as they say, no good plan survives contact with the enemy, but it works pretty well so everyone scratches their particular play-style itch.
I might actually take an extended break from this game after this weekend. Some of the annoyances are getting to me. I shouldn’t get burned out before 1.0 and the new map.
We’ll see if I stick to this plan!
I’ve had this feeling for a while that the hit detection of this game as it applies to vehicles is…sloppy? Maybe that’s not the right word. Simple? I just feel that something is off and watching various streamers just enforces that feeling.
Maybe i’m just being a little salty but I’ve found that my teammates and i have been shot out of cars a lot recently - like uncannily - culminating in last nights death on a bike where the single shooter first headshot me(driver), then on the next shot took out the passenger in the sidecar with their Scar. This was across slightly undulating terrain at near full speed, while I was weaving a bit.
I dunno, i know there’s hacking going on in the game, but i loathe to declare any good hit hacking, but still…taking out two people on a rapidly moving motorcycle across uneven terrain on subsequent shots?
Do other people feel similarly(regarding either the hit detection/vehicles or hacking), or is my experience a little isolated?
One thing I was considering that might explain my perception is whether all shots might be actually registered on my client side(ie maybe for bandwidth, the server registers lets say 10 shots from 3 sources at the player and records the player as down, but for bandwidth’s sake, only ‘shows’ 2 hits to that particular client)…
The only thing I’ve ever noticed is the typical multiplayer shooter client side detection issue where you get killed after you’ve already gone around a corner.
All of those things. Tick rate is low. Hit detection in general at times can be spotty. Vehicles, particularly in squad or duo games can be death traps as you are often taking 2-4x the fire and there is more than likely a lot of cheating going on.
Netcode is still pretty screwy on a regular basis.
There are cheaters, but with the massive population I can only recall less than a handful of times where I was truly suspicious and maybe once when I was completely sure that someone was cheating.
But a lot of the weird stuff simply comes back to the wacky netcode and the fact that there seem to be zero real limits to latency and not all regions have all the same game modes. So there’s nothing preventing me from playing in the Asia servers, or preventing them from playing in NA and that can lead to unfun lag/desync and stupidity because the game seems to treat someone with 250 ping the same as someone with 20 ping.
Their general plan was to potentially add vaulting next month for testing if nothing else. And there are still quite a few things being worked on.
I do get bored solo, but since I treat it like a goofy roguelike the random systems keep me interested enough to continue playing.
Oh, and the vehicle thing. Also weird, but consider that motorcycles leave you completely exposed. The advantage is their speed, but if someone is half way decent aim and can lead targets or even get a little lucky it’s not that big a deal to shoot people out of vehicles. I do it all the time. I hit a guy last week from about 400 meters in a full speed Dacia hauling ass down a mountain with a kar98. Easier with an extended AR mag when you have 40 tries to get it right potentially.
You also don’t know what you don’t know. With no kill cam, you have real ideal where you got killed from and plenty of folk use other peoples’ fire as cover to engage at the same time.
Latency does weird things in this game as well. A couple of audible shots your side may have been a full mag from the shooter.
Of course cheaters use that kind of engine funkiness to argue there are no cheaters, but there are no shortages of sites and forums advertising a vast array of cheating tools for PUBG.
I watched my little brother play, and two games in a row, he ran into people who very obviously exploited the “make all the buildings disappear but only for you so you can drive vehicles and shoot through them too” glitch. I haven’t seen any in my games, though (although in a lot of cases, I’m not sure I’d be able to identify it as cheating if I did).