Looks good, but just as they announced it the game has been down for 9+ hours.
An online game has been down for nine hours??? In 2018?
Fixing stuff requires short outages!
To be fair, it was only down for some people and not a general outage.
Probably their best patch ever. Always possible that the servers might start on fire, but so far it’s maintaining a solid 60hz through an entire match once you land. It has felt rock solid.
They have plenty to still improve, but this is a great place to start.
Yeah, desync is still an issue but that takes a more rework approach (design) than an actual simple implementation improvement. I’ve also noticed items spawn in on the ground while I’m still in the air which is also nice.
Update on your numbers:
Now that is an ordinary trajectory for the usual online game.
This totally reminds me of the post-WoW bubble MMO boom. So many contenders and WoW still stands tall.
A pretty meaty patch came out last night:
The training mode is awesome, though I wish you could play it offline solo instead of being matchmade with 19 other players. But it’s still way above and beyond the shooting range people requested.
I feel like they add content just often enough to keep me interested. I was hoping to take a break, but now I want to check out the training range.
And there’s a new snow map on its way too:
Btw, is this the only BR game with more than one map? And they’ll soon have four, with most being larger than the single map in those other games. Content wise, it seems like nobody else is even close.
Blackout will take a good chunk of PUBGs players, but after playing the beta over the weekend I can certainly see why a lot of people would still prefer PUBG. Blackout is WAY faster of a game. I really like it, but I can totally see some people not liking the pacing. I was playing with my one friend and he liked it but certainly wasn’t overjoyed like I was.
It would be nice if PUBG took the 30 second counter to start the matches. it might not seem like a big deal, but I felt like joining matches and getting back into the game was so much faster in Blackout. It makes getting killed less painful. You just shrug and bam you are in another match. With matchmaking and then the counter it can be a good 4-5 minutes to get back into another match of PUBG.
It would also be good if PUBG redid the blue zone pacing on the old maps. It’s just too slow in the midgame. The map is freaking huge and unless you are looking for a fight it’s a snooze fest.
Blackout needs to working on it’s pacing for the live game. Pretty much every match was ending with 5-10 people and a gigantic circle. As this was just the beta I’m sure that will get some tweaking. Curious to see how they support it going forward. Neat little events like Fortnight does would go a long way to making it stay fresh. That’s another thing PUBG sucks at. They did the one battle pass and then didn’t do another one. Shrug… Guess it wasn’t popular?
The problem with Blackout was that they waited for all the 88 players to join before starting the counter, so the actual time spent in the lobby felt much longer than in PUBG (maybe the PC matchmaking was bad because it was often stuck around 82-87 players before it filled up). That being said, I agree, have a 30 second counter in PUBG too.
What? I rarely get into a lobby without the counter having started (EU servers). And if it hasn’t, it takes maybe up to 30 seconds before it starts (because it starts at 90 players). Of course, this will vary depending on the number of concurrent players. We once accidentally went into FPP mode on Asian servers, and it took forever to fill up.
I get it all the time lately on NA. Totally depends on the time of day. 9AM on a weekday in NA it can take you forever to find a game. Of course it’s rare that I’m home during that time.
After playing ~10 rounds of Blackout between PS4 and Xbox One, I still prefer PUBG on Xbox One despite the performance issues.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it feels amazing playing a Battle Royale game like this on console at ~60fps (I know Fortnite is there, but that game feels completely different). But I just like the mechanics and affordances PUBG gives.
For example, the directional sound seems much more effective in PUBG. In Blackout it’s just too difficult to hear people around you, and I don’t like that crouch-walking is pretty much silent in Blackout.
I also don’t like the weapon drops as much in Blackout. It just seems like a muddling excess of way too many similar weapons, compared to the much clearer differentiation between weapons in PUBG.
Healing is also way too prevalent in Blackout, and way too quick, yet time-to-kill is too short, which leads to very strange encounters where everyone just ducks out of the way quickly, heals, and comes back.
I certainly agree that the healing needs tweaking. And I have to also agree on the weapons. Aside from the major weapon types, handgun, shotgun, smg, ar and sniper it’s hard to tell a difference between guns. The fact that they are all made up gun names certainly doesn’t help.
Man, I hated this fact. If you make up guns, at least make them interesting.
Edit: Also, in the near future I guess guns won’t have different firing modes. Sigh.