,1,This free-to-play battle royale shooter is powered by a cash shop selling 3 billion a year in player costumes. PUBG starts with each player looting buildings to find guns, gear, gas, and grape juice, all in the name of serial murder. The magical blue circle gets smaller every five minutes, forcing people closer and closer so they can kill each other like it’s a commercial flight after covid. There’s only one chicken dinner in this deathmatch of 100 players, so it’s pretty common to leave empty handed.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/game_design_elements
Tutorial:
This had some major room for improvement: The transition from the start screen was overwhelming and awkward, and the tutorial itself probably hasn’t gotten a touch-up since Sony became the surrogate mother for PUBG.
The training map is truly brilliant, but relies on a player to know what they’re looking for and what they need in order to take proper advantage of it. Three out of five.
Configuration:
The menu is fantastic. The settings are expansive, interface is clean and responsive, and the HUD even shows key hints without feeling intrusive. The designers didn’t phone this in, and it’s absolutely amazing. The settings are expansive and still useful, and there’s even good support for accessibility. The keybinding process needs a better color scheme, and some indicator when you wipe out other keybinds. These small shortcomings make it almost perfect at four out of five!
Code quality:
Ohhh boy. I almost soft-locked my progression in the first couple minutes, and the little blind spots kept continuing. More than once I accidentally swapped items because the interact action changed at the last second. All the items just piled on the ground felt like a slap in the face to whoever had to model those shelves. But, with an incredibly stable application, code earns a Three out of five.
Player friendliness:
PUBG does offer a nice choice of options to make game elements easier to see, and a variety of modes to help make the game accessible for a wider variety of skill levels. There’s no REAL penalty for stepping away, so there’s plenty of opportunity for breaks. HOWEVER, the game is self-aware of how critical good stereo hearing is, and doesn’t offer any options to those with bad hearing or poor speakers. With such a high emphasis on sound, there should be hearing protection warnings, as this game encourages listening at a damagingly high volume in order to be competitive. This cash shop has all the predatory techniques kicked in: Purchasable loot boxes, several types of currencies, limited time high-pressure sales, daily missions, and predatory pricing, but the cosmetics don’t impact the main gameplay loop so we’ll go with three out of five for player friendliness.
Depth of content:
After playing one, wait... TWO AI matches and one real match, I already felt like I’d seen all this game has to offer. The only real variety comes in the cosmetic items from the cash shop. Building models are heavily recycled on maps, there only appears to be two maps accessible, and the main game loop never evolves or changes. There are some other custom game modes, but with barely enough players to fill a single pubg round, you’re unlikely to find a match. With a quite fun core game loop, it does repetitive in the first two hours. depth of content comes in lowest at two out of five.
Cutscenes:
There was a grand total of about 6 cutscenes I encountered during play, and they were all seconds long, informative, and skippable. The tutorial cutscenes are jarring and require the ONLY press-to-close action in the entire menu. During the round win splash screen the player never loses control of their character, and the plane uses the minimum amount of time for some technical trickery for a stable map load. Almost perfect, four out of five!
Visual and sound effects:
This game looks and sounds amazing. Vehicles are hardly used at all during play, and are still INCREDIBLY detailed with sounds that match their cars, down to the manual gearbox shifting. Each gun has a unique sound, footsteps sound accurate on different terrain, and even dropping the medicine bottle has a sound. The gun models are all beautiful, and the visual effects look both accurate and great. FIVE OUT OF FIVE!
Overall, I’d say this game is FAIRLY well put together. My general impression I get is that the development team when to a painfully high level of detail on the things they bothered to get right, and then just got the rest to work. So is it a well designed game? Eh, mostly, but for a huge studio that could pay for a AAA title just with their leather spandex sales, there’s plenty of room for improvement.
