PUBG: Battlegrounds
PUBG: Battlegrounds (previously titled PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) is a 2017 battle royale video game published by Krafton, and developed by Krafton’s PUBG Studios. The game, which was inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), is based on previous mods created by Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene for other games, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene’s creative direction. Played from either a third-person or first-person perspective, up to one hundred players parachute onto an island where they are tasked to scavenge for weapons and equipment to kill other players while avoiding getting killed themselves. The available safe area of the game’s map decreases in size over time, directing surviving players into an ever-tightening space to force encounters.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was first released for Windows via Steam’s early access beta program in March 2017, with a full release in December 2017; the same month, Microsoft Studios studios released it for the Xbox One via the Xbox Game Preview program, with a full release coming in September 2018. Afterwards the game was ported to the PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles, and the Stadia streaming platform, and has also spawned a mobile version, PUBG Mobile, for Android and iOS. The game is continuously developed under the games as a service model and has been free-to-play for all platforms since January 2022.
Gameplay
PUBG is a player versus player shooter game in which up to one hundred players fight in a battle royale, a type of large-scale last man standing deathmatch where players fight to remain the last alive. Players can choose to enter the match solo, duo, or with a small team of up to four people. The last person or team alive wins the match.
Each match starts with players parachuting from a plane onto one of the eight maps which have different sizes and terrain.The plane’s flight path across the map varies with each round, requiring players to quickly determine the best time to eject and parachute to the ground.
[1] Players start with no gear beyond customized clothing selections which do not affect gameplay. Once they land, players can search buildings, ghost towns and other sites to find weapons, vehicles, armor, and other equipment. These items are procedurally distributed throughout the map at the start of a match, with certain high-risk zones typically having better equipment.Killed players can be looted to acquire their gear as well.
Players can opt to play either from the first-person or third-person perspective, each having their own advantages and disadvantages in combat and situational awareness; though server-specific settings can be used to force all players into one perspective to eliminate some advantages.
Every few minutes, the playable area of the map begins to shrink down towards a random location, with any player caught outside the safe area taking damage incrementally, and eventually being eliminated if the safe zone is not entered in time; in game, the players see the boundary as a shimmering blue wall that contracts over time.This results in a more confined map, in turn increasing the chances of encounters.
During the course of the match, random regions of the map are highlighted in red and bombed, posing a threat to players who remain in that area.In both cases, players are warned a few minutes before these events, giving them time to relocate to safety.A plane will fly over various parts of the playable map occasionally at random,
or wherever a player uses a flare gun, and drop a loot package, containing items which are typically unobtainable during normal gameplay. These packages emit highly visible red smoke, drawing interested players near it and creating further confrontations.On average, a full round takes no more than 30 minutes.
Development
The game’s concept and design was led by Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, who had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.At the time he created DayZ: Battle Royale, around 2013, Irish-born Greene had been living in Brazil for a few years as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer, and played video games such as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America’s Army.
gameplay, and he started playing around with a custom server, learning programming as he went along.[12] Greene found most multiplayer first-person shooters too repetitive, considering maps small and easy to memorize. He wanted to create something with more random aspects so that players would not know what to expect, creating a high degree of replayability;
this was done by creating vastly larger maps that could not be easily memorized, and using random item placement across it.Greene was also inspired by an online competition for DayZ called Survivor GameZ, which featured a number of Twitch and YouTube streamers fighting until only a few were left; as he was not a streamer himself, Greene wanted to create a similar game mode that anyone could play.
His initial efforts on this mod were more inspired by The Hunger Games novels, where players would try to vie for stockpiles of weapons at a central location, but he moved away from this partially to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and to avoid copyright issues with the novels.In taking inspiration from the Battle Royale film, Greene had wanted to use square safe areas, but his inexperience in coding led him to use circular safe areas instead, which persisted to Battlegrounds.
Design
PUBG represents the standalone version of what Greene believes is the “final version” of the battle royale concept, incorporating the elements he had designed in previous iterations.Faster development was possible with the game engine Unreal Engine 4, compared with ARMA and H1Z1, which were built with proprietary game engines.
Greene acknowledged that implementing the size of the maps in PUBG has been one of the challenges with working with Unreal, which was not designed with such maps in mind.The game was designed as a mix between the realistic simulation of ARMA 3 and the arcade-like action focus and player accessibility of H1Z1.To prevent in-game cheating, the game uses BattlEye anti-cheating software, which had permanently banned over 13 million players by October 2018. BattlEye indicated that 99% of all cheating software for the game was developed in China.
Based on Greene’s experience with the genre, an island with many terrain features was picked as the first map, known as “Erangel”.The map design scope was to offer players many possible options for strategic and unique gameplay.Some buildings and structures were designed to depict the style of the brutalist architecture of the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The developer team playtested architecture features and random item placement systems, looking at both how close-quarters encounters went and open terrain areas.
The goal was to optimize the right distribution and placement of weapons and gear across the map, to encourage players to make strategic decisions about how to proceed in the game without overly penalizing players who may not find weapons within the first few minutes of a round.During early access, additional maps were planned, such as one set on a fictional island in the Adriatic Sea that included snow-covered Yugoslavian territories.Greene stated that he thought the Erangel map felt disjointed despite meeting their goals for gameplay, and sought to create more unified ideas with future maps.
Release
Bluehole used closed alpha and beta periods with about 80,000 players to gauge initial reaction to the gameplay and adjust balance prior to a wider release.Just prior to the early access phase on Steam, Bluehole opened a few servers and invited some popular live streamers of similar games to try it out as to start gaining interest. Early access for the Windows version launched on March 23, 2017.This period was planned to last approximately six months, originally aiming for a September 2017 release.
This period was planned to last approximately six months, originally aiming for a September 2017 release. In July 2017, Greene announced that they would need to extend the early access period by a few months, continuing to release updates on a regular basis, with plans to still release by the end of 2017, as committing to this original period “could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met”.
Initially, Bluehole had expected that they would just gain enough players through early access to smooth out the gameplay, and only when the game was completed, they would have started more marketing for the title. The sudden interest in the game from early access exceeded their expectations, and put emphasis on the stability of the game and its underlying networking alongside gameplay improvements.Through August 2017, these updates generally included a major weekly patch alongside major monthly updates that provided key performance improvements.
However, from August onward, Bluehole backed off the rate of such patches, as the high frequency has led to some quality control issues, and the developers rather make sure each patch content is well-vetted by the community before providing new updates; this did not change their plans for a 2017 release, where it fully released out of early access on December 20.
| 2017 | PUBG (PC, early access) |
|---|---|
| PUBG (Xbox One, game preview) | |
| PUBG (PC, release) | |
| 2018 | PUBG Mobile |
| PUBG Mobile KR | |
| PUBG (Xbox One, release) | |
| PUBG (PS4) | |
| 2019 | PUBG Mobile VN |
| Game for Peace | |
| PUBG Mobile TW | |
| PUBG Mobile Lite | |
| PUBG Lite (PC) | |
| 2020 | PUBG (Stadia) |
| 2021 | Battlegrounds Mobile India |
| 2022 | Transition to free to play |
| 2023 | |
| 2024 | |
| 2025 | End of support for PS4 and Xbox One versions |
| PUBG (Xbox Series X/S, PS5) |
Awards
While still in early access, Battlegrounds won the “Best Multiplayer Game” and was also nominated for the categories “Game of the Year” and “Best Ongoing Game” at The Game Awards 2017.The game’s nomination for “Game of the Year” created some debate, being the first early access title to be named for one of the top industry awards. Also, about a month before it was released, the game won “Best Multiplayer Game” and “PC Game of the Year” at the 35th Golden Joystick Awards,
whereas its other nominations were for “Studio of the Year” (PUBG Corporation) and “Ultimate Game of the Year”.It also won the “Breakout Game of the Year” award at PC Gamer‘s end of the year awards, whereas its other nomination was for “Game of the Year”.
Polygon ranked the game second on their list of the 50 best games of 2017, and The Verge named it one of their 15 Best Games of 2017,
while Entertainment Weekly ranked it seventh on their “Best Games of 2017” list.
Following release, Battlegrounds has been nominated and won several industry awards, including winning Best Multiplayer Game at the 35th Golden Joystick Awards and The Game Awards 2017, as well as Action Game of the Year during the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.
| Year | Award | Category | Result | Ref(s). |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 35th Golden Joystick Awards | Best Multiplayer Game | Won | [203][204] |
| PC Game of the Year | Won | |||
| Ultimate Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| The Game Awards 2017 | Best Multiplayer Game | Won | [200] | |
| Best Ongoing Game | Nominated | |||
| Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| 2018 | New York Game Awards 2018 | Big Apple Award for Best Game of the Year | Nominated | [210] |
| 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards | Game of the Year | Nominated | [211][212] | |
| Action Game of the Year | Won | |||
| Outstanding Achievement in Game Design | Nominated | |||
| Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay | Won | |||
| 2018 Italian Video Game Awards | Innovation Award | Won | [213] | |
| 2018 SXSW Gaming Awards | Esports Game of the Year | Won | [214][215] | |
| Excellence in Design | Nominated | |||
| Excellence in Multiplayer | Won | |||
| Most Promising New Intellectual Property | Nominated | |||
| Trending Game of the Year | Won | |||
| Video Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| 18th Game Developers Choice Awards | Best Design | Nominated | [216][217] | |
| Innovation Award | Nominated | |||
| Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| 14th British Academy Games Awards | Evolving Game | Nominated | [218][219] | |
| Multiplayer | Nominated | |||
| Original Property | Nominated | |||
| Famitsu Awards | Excellence Prize | Won | [220] | |
| Rookie Award | Won | |||
| Game Critics Awards 2018 | Best Ongoing Game | Nominated | [221][222] | |
| 2018 Teen Choice Awards | Choice Videogame | Nominated | [223][224] | |
| BBC Radio 1’s Teen Awards | Best Game | Nominated | [225] | |
| 36th Golden Joystick Awards | Still Playing Award | Nominated | [226][227] | |
| Mobile Game of the Year (PUBG Mobile) | Won | |||
| Xbox Game of the Year | Nominated | |||
| The Game Awards 2018 | Best Mobile Game (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [228] | |
| Gamers’ Choice Awards | Fan Favorite Multiplayer Game | Nominated | [229] | |
| Fan Favorite Battle Royale Game | Nominated | |||
| Fan Favorite Mobile Game (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | |||
| The Steam Awards | Game of the Year | Won | [230] | |
| Australian Games Awards | Shooter of the Year | Nominated | [231] | |
| 2019 | 2019 Italian Video Game Awards | Best Mobile Game (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [232] |
| 37th Golden Joystick Awards | eSports Game of the Year (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [233] | |
| Google Play Users’ Choice Awards | Best Competitive Game (PUBG Mobile) | Won | [234] | |
| Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards India | Favourite Mobile Game (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [235] | |
| Esports Awards | Esports Breakthrough Game of The Year (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [236] | |
| 2020 | Indonesia Gaming Awards | Game of the Year (PUBG Mobile) | Won | [237] |
| Esports Awards | Esports Mobile Game of the Year (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [238] | |
| 2021 | Esports Awards | Esports Mobile Game of the Year (PUBG Mobile) | Nominated | [239] |
| 2022 | Esports Awards | Esports Mobile Game of the Year (PUBG Mobile) | Won | [240] |
