https://youtu.be/yvhWGQwutm8?t=43m43s
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, 2017’s most successful game launches on Xbox One tomorrow, but in some parts of the world, they already have their hands on the Battle Royale experience that’s hooked over 24 million people on PC. Unfortunately, it looks like there may be some optimization problems. Early streams and video captures are showing stuttering and an inconsistent framerate for the Xbox version of the game, with some saying the game dipped into the single-digits.
This isn’t good, at all. PUBG is a fast-paced, kill or be killed game in which one wrong move in your battle to survive inside a shrinking battlefield against 99 other players needs the most precise movement possible. With no aim-assist on the analog controls of a console joypad, every frame matters, and right now it seems like people trying to survive are having a tough time. The rooms inside houses seem extremely dark, which will affect looting (especially in the early game rush for tools of survival), and textures are popping in and out. How will players know if that’s a bush or a person they need to shoot?
And it’s not the absolute most crucial part of the game, but beginning a match by parachuting out and landing in a safe area, or maneuvering away from a zone in which a host of people who want to kill you with anything they can get your hands on await, is important. In the below clip (cued at the appropriate timestamp) we see how choppy it is landing, looking like it’s way under the reported 30FPS the game was supposed to run at. Additionally, look at those shadows popping in and out. That’s going to get people killed. It’s not completely game-breaking, but this isn’t something that makes me excited to step away from my gaming rig anytime soon.
We will be reviewing PUBG throughout this week starting in just a few hours, so hopefully an 11th-hour patch comes through to clean some of this up. After watching quite a few streams and videos, it seems like options PC gamers enjoy, such as turning down foliage and lightening shadows to raise framerates and help gameplay be less obnoxious, are something that’s taken for granted.