PUBG

                                            PUBG

Players Unknown's Battle Ground

While the full title is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, most people call it PUBG, because it’s not quite a title that rolls off the tongue. As of writing, it’s an Early Access title on Steam for PC - an unfinished game that you can buy and play before release.

The game itself is a take on the Battle Royale (or H1Z1: King of the Kill, or The Hunger Games) concept - a number of people are released onto an island, last person standing wins. To do that, you’ve got to find weapons, kill people you see, and avoid danger. It started life as a mod for Arma 2, where PlayerUnknown himself (who has the much more sensible name of Brendan Greene) was creating what he wanted to be the definitive Battle Royale experience. He then co-developed H1Z1: King of the Kill, a similar concept for the zombie survival game H1Z1, before moving to Bluehole Inc to work on PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

Each match pits about 100 people against each other, some of which can be in teams, while others will be going it alone. Winners receive their prestigious ‘winner winner, chicken dinner’ title, on top of an in-game currency that lets them purchase cosmetic items.

That’s pretty much all there is to it - while there is a special zombie-focused mode, it follows a similar pattern. This simplicity is key to the game's success: Ted Forsyth, aka PyrionFlax on YouTube, spoke of how important this is, both as a player and a streamer.

"Player Unknown's Battlegrounds -- anyone can watch that. It’s super simple: you get loot, the circle closes, and you have to kill people. In DOTA, you’ve got like 108 heroes. They’re all different. There’s different items too. So if you’re tuning in and you’ve never played DOTA, you won’t really know what’s happening."

What's the best way to win in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds?

There’s two main tactics for winning in PUBG - go on a rampaging killing spree, or hide away until the time is right. The former will net you slightly more rewards at the end of the game, but it’s negligible. Which tactic you go for depends on your playing style and the guns you find.

Everyone starts a match without a single weapon, they’ve got to scavenge in buildings to find guns, ammo, first aid kits, and so on. If you’re lucky, you’ll find an array of weapons, typically one long-range rifle with a magnifying scope and one short-range weapon like a shotgun. This allows you to choose if you want to go hunting for other players, risking your own life more directly, or hide away and ambush someone who gets too close.

  Typically, hiding is the better option - no matter how good of a shot you are, the one map that’s currently available forces players to traverse wide open areas. When making your way through this, hunting another player, it’s not uncommon to have someone turn the tables from an unseen location. Balancing the threat of this with the reward of finishing another player off is the challenge, on top of being able to shoot accurately.

On the other hand, if you’re hiding, you’ve typically got more moments of safety. As mentioned before, the game will use a field of electricity to damage players that don’t move towards certain locations. These are the times where you’re most at danger, because many other players will be doing the same thing, rushing to a safe zone.

Hiding for the entire game, only to move at the last possible moment to the safe zone, isn’t the best tactic either. Generally, what’s best is to be hiding away and using that to your advantage. Know where you might be heading towards soon, where enemies might be coming from, and where your strengths lie. Larger groups of buildings typically attract more players - if there’s one road from a group of buildings to the safe zone, you can either avoid it or use it to set up an ambush.

REQUIREMENT,S PC

Here's what you need to run PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on your PC, according to developer Bluehole:

OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i3-4340 / AMD FX-6300
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB / AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 30 GB available space