PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
(PUBG) is an online multiplayer battle royal game developed and published by
PUBG corporation a subsidiary, of South Korean video game company Bluehole. The
game is based on previous mods that were created by Brendan
"PlayerUnknown" Greene for other games, inspired by the 2000 Japanese
film Battle Royal, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene's creative
direction. In the game, up to one hundred players parachute onto an island and
scavenge for weapons and equipment to kill others while avoiding getting killed
themselves. The available safe area of the game's map decreases in size over
time, directing surviving players into tighter areas to force encounters. The
last player or team standing wins the round.
Battlegrounds
was first released for Microsoft Windows
via Steam's early access beta program in
March 2017, with a full release in December 2017. The game was also released by
Microsoft Studio for the Xbox One via its Xbox Game Preview program that same
month, and officially released in September 2018. A free to play mobile version
for Android and iOS was released in 2018, in addition to a port for the
PlayStation4. Battlegrounds is one of the best-selling and most played video
game of all time, selling over fifty million copies worldwide by June 2018,
with over 400 million players in total when including the mobile version.
Battlegrounds
received positive reviews from critics, who found that while the game had some
technical flaws, it presented new types of gameplay that could be easily
approached by players of any skill level and was highly replayable. The game
was attributed to popularizing the battle royale genre, with a number of
unofficial Chinese clones also being produced following its success. The game
also received several game of the year nominations, among other accolades. PUBG
Corporation has run several small tournaments and introduced in-game tools to
help with broadcasting the game to spectators, as they wish for it to become a
popular esport. The game has also been banned in some countries for allegedly
being harmful and addictive to young players.
The Gameplay in Battlegrounds 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 four maps,
with areas of approximately 8 × 8 kilometres (5.0 × 5.0 mi), 6 × 6 kilometres
(3.7 × 3.7 mi), and 4 × 4 kilometres (2.5 × 2.5 mi) in size. 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. 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.
At
the completion of each round, players gain in-game currency based on their
performance. The currency is used to purchase crates which contain cosmetic
items for character or weapon customization. A rotating "event
mode" was added to the game in March 2018. These events change up the
normal game rules, such as establishing larger teams or squads, or altering the
distribution of weapons and armor across the game map.
THE DEVELOPMENT STORY OF PUBG -
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. The DayZ mod caught his interest, both as a realistic
military simulation and its open-ended gameplay, and started playing around
with a custom server, learning programming as he went along. 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 moved away from this partially
to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and
also 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.
When
DayZ became its own standalone title, interest in his ARMA 2 version of the
Battle Royale mod trailed off, and Greene transitioned development of the mod
to ARMA 3. Sony Online Entertainment (now the Daybreak Game Company) had
become interested in Greene's work, and brought him on as a consultant to
develop on H1Z1, licensing the battle royale idea from him.[12] In February
2016, Sony Online split H1Z1 into two separate games, the survival mode H1Z1:
Just Survive, and the battle royale-like H1Z1: King of the Kill, around the
same time that Greene's consultation period was over.
Separately,
the Seoul-based studio Ginno Games, led by Chang-han Kim and who developed
massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) for personal computers, was acquired
and renamed Bluehole Ginno Games by Bluehole in January 2015, a major South
Korean publisher of MMOs and mobile games. Kim recognized that
producing a successful game in South Korea generally meant it would be
published globally, and wanted to use his team to create a successful title for
personal computers that followed the same model as other mobile games published
by Bluehole. He had already been excited about making a type of battle royale
game after he had played DayZ, in part that the format had not caught on in
Korea. He also wanted to make this through an early access model and have a
very limited development schedule to get the game out as quickly as possible,
while treating the product as a "games as a service" model to be able
to support it for many years. In researching what had been done, he came
across Greene's mods and reached out to him. In July 2017, Bluehole
partnered with social media platform Facebook to provide exclusive streaming
content to Facebook's gaming channels, as part of their push to provide more
gaming content for its users.
Around
the same time that Greene left Sony Online, Kim contacted and offered him the
opportunity to work on a new battle royale concept. Within a week, Greene flew
out to Bluehole's headquarters in Korea to discuss the options, and a few weeks
later, became the creative director of Bluehole. He moved to South Korea to
oversee development.[ According to Greene, this was the first time a Korean
game studio had brought aboard a foreigner for a creative director role, and
while a risk, he says that his relationship with Bluehole's management is strong,
allowing Greene's team to work autonomously with minimal oversight. The
game's main musical theme was composed by Tom Salta, who was personally
selected By Greene as he and the team were looking for an "orchestral
electronic hybrid theme" that would give players a "huge
build-up", keeping them "resolutely determined" until a match
starts.
Development
began in early 2016 and was publicly announced that June, with plans to have
the game ready within a year. Kim served as executive producer for the
game. Bluehole started with a team of about 35 developers supporting
Greene's work, but had expanded to 70 by June 2017.Greene stated that many
of these developers were voluntarily putting in longer work hours into the game
due to their dedication to the project, and not by any mandate from himself or
Bluehole's management. In addition to Bluehole, Greene also credits
Bohemia Interactive, the developers of ARMA and DayZ, for support with motion
capture animations via their Prague studio.
With
the rapid growth of interest in the game, Bluehole spun out the entire
development for Battlegrounds into Bluehole Ginno Games in September 2017,
which was renamed PUBG Corporation with Kim as its chief executive officer.
PUBG Corporation continued the development of the game and its marketing and
growth, opening an office in the United States with plans for future ones in
Europe and Japan. In August 2018, PUBG Corporation launched the "Fix
PUBG" campaign, acknowledging that that game by then still had several
lingering bugs and other performance issues. The campaign finished in
November, with PUBG Corporation calling it a success as everything listed had
been implemented by then.
In
March 2019, Greene announced that he was stepping down as the game's lead
designer, but would still serve as a creative consultant. Tae-seok Jang, the
game's art director, would replace him, with Green relocating to PUBG's studio
in Amsterdam, PUBG Special Projects. Greene stated that he believed the
main Battlegrounds team was at a place to continue developing the game in the
direction he had set to keep the game unique among the other battle royale
games it had launched, and he wanted to try something not tied to battle royale
but still multiplayer-based. The move also put him closer to his family in
Ireland.
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