What Makes PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds a Good Game?

In June of this year I decided to start writing video-essays for a personal YouTube channel that I named ‘waste_a_life’. The first video is inspired by and focussed on multiplayer battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. You can watch the video above or read the script for the video below.

Thank you.

If I were to choose one thing that sets survival games apart from everything else in video games now, it would be pacing.

Doesn’t matter if it’s horror, wilderness, or a creative survival-sandbox: pacing is the key development difference that will have you shooting, navigating, and experiencing that game differently to any other genre.

Time spent looting containers, analysing your inventory and however many status bars you have slowly burning down intermingle with real-time gameplay to create gameplay loops that often demand you to stop, think, plan, and proceed. But does that intent translate?

This is waste_a_life, and today we’re going to talk about why PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a good game, among other things.

Survival games would like you to think there is a definitive weight behind every action you make in their world — the can of beans you crack open in the early game might just be one you need late into the night — but I’d argue that there is a weightlessness to a lot of experiences to be found in survival games.

You wash up on the island, awake from the plane crash, emerge from the downed space-craft; let loose into the developer’s world to grapple head on with the mechanics at a pace that grinds against anything that could be considered satisfying, ticking a checklist of to-dos that every survival game seems obliged to include. Countless play-throughs, countless games. Everything restarted and re-experienced per game for what is ultimately a gameplay loop of diminishing returns.

Find the melee weapon, encounter the local wildlife, hit the tree, pick up what the tree dropped, sigh deeply as you open the ever-present crafting system. I could go on for a little while talking about how these games rely so deeply on crafting systems that contribute next to nothing to their games aside from another, deeper set collection of unticked boxes.

It feels like the genre performed something of a collective bait and switch on many players, promising deep, developed survival experiences, then eventually delivering janky and undercooked dumpsters of disparate mechanics and unfulfilled potential.

There are definitely games that get this collection of mechanics right, often times through the compelling nature of the worlds they’re set in. The Long Dark’s stark, uncaring winter wasteland delivers an experience at times so vivid and ferocious, it makes wildness survival almost artistic. The Forest’s inclusion of unpredictable and bizarre cannibal tribes makes a serviceable base-building survival experience into something more akin to Cannibal Holocaust at times.

All that said, I’d argue that the buzz of the survival game genre within the industry has been tempered slightly by so many imitations, so many unoriginal takes on the same concept. When Rust was released on the very tail end of 2013, it garnered most of its good-will by basically being a less self-serious take on the genre, naked men gallivanting across it’s landscape. ARK is a similar situation.

Through the seventh generation of video game consoles, advanced graphical and animation technology allowed developers and writers of videogames to indulge in what some might refer to as the ‘blockbuster-isation’ of videogames. Stories, style and presentation took precedence, with developers trying to wrangle these new approaches and opportunities for storytelling into meaningful gameplay experiences; and don’t get me wrong, the seventh generation was where I basically grew up — but the growing pains shown during this period are obvious.

Now though, deep into the eighth generation of consoles and relative PC development, games have exited this honeymoon period of style over substance to return to robust gameplay systems. A fantastic example of this is id Software’s 2016 reboot of DOOM — an absolute left-field knock out that had more in common with something like Mad Max: Fury Road than a lot of other shooters at the time. When DOOM is in its element — and it rarely isn’t — it presents such an inimitable connection of style, empowerment, pacing and immediacy that few games can replicate. Few games, but some. Empowerment and immediacy; they’re two things we’re going to return to.

However, it’s been a few minutes now and I haven’t even mentioned the game that this video supposedly exists for. And yeah sorry, but it’ll be a little longer.

Let’s talk about DayZ.

DayZ was released as a stand-alone game by Czech Republic studio Bohemia Interactive in February of 2013. Prior to that, DayZ, and it’s creator Dean Hall, enjoyed the kind of cult status that many janky-yet-ambitious mods enjoy while they’re underground enough to get away with it — but with the release of the standalone game; issues surrounding the stability and moment to moment gameplay of the game remained unanswered to this day, over four years later.

To this day, loading up a game in DayZ feels more like an exercise in futility than anything, and that’s fine, I like games that don’t hold your hand and expect you to fail and fail again — but DayZ, and a lot of the media surrounding it, seems so obsessed with talking about the metaphysical affect the game has on its players, even going so far to call it an ‘anti-game’, that it forgets to make moment to moment gameplay engaging. Rhythms of play, to quote Noah Gervais, do not exist here, just anxious monotonous drone, the kind that has you running kilometres trying to escape zombie aggro.

I talk about DayZ so much because it does feel that for a time it was truly the face of combat based survival games. Surpassed in time by others, but always omnipresent in the back of my mind as how things can go wrong. It feels necessary in a way though, an unfulfilled promise that at least made the promise seem interesting to begin with, to perhaps be made good on by another developer, somewhere down the line.

So, to revise. Pacing. It forms the basis of an experience. But let’s add in one more thing, slightly under that, but no less important.

Immediacy. And with that, we come to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.

This is the blood that pumps through the veins of this game. It could be said that pop culture, and by extension, popular mainstream videogames, are in a constant state of perfectionism. Take the mechanics, the experience, the tension, the encounters, the entire game-play loop; and make it satisfying, make it immediate. Make it hit, and make sure that when it hits, it hits hard.

From the moment you load in to a round of Battlegrounds there are decisions to be made about the course that this match is (hopefully) going to take for you. The fact that players are given an instantaneous choice over how they want to even position themselves within a round of Battlegrounds speaks to the games clever handling of the next two extremely important elements of why Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is a good game; empowerment and tension.

This is often the mixture that so many other games get wrong. DayZ planted it’s whole gameplay ideology on it’s supposed ability to cultivate tension, but it fails due to it’s inability to correctly handle the second element; empowerment.

For a period surrounding and following 2010 and the success of horror games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, games had an intense infatuation with the concept of disempowerment, something that is still seen as a viable gameplay element to this day — and that’s good; Amnesia is an incredible game, I’m not here to argue that, but you can’t simply remove a players ability to fight back and assume that your game is now within some category that has transcended the need for meaningful mechanics. Dark Souls is another example of a game that implements disempowerment in a meaningful way, in a way that is so baked in to the mechanics and gameplay loop of that game that it became a phenomenon, and rightly so.

The method through which Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds handles empowerment can be surmised with one phrase: ‘waste no time’. After entering the map alongside your fellow desperate murderers within an aircraft carrier, players are presented with a choice, and their first moment of empowerment. When are you going to eject? The map is already sprawled out in front of you, another piece of information presented without comment but undeniably helpful, so now you simply must choose what your early and mid-game could look like.

Do you parachute towards the largest city centre, the promise of supplies and early game punch-kills drawing you in — or do you take a gamble on the housing littering the countryside, usually a safer and quieter choice albeit with lesser guarantee of high quality equipment? Already, players are expected to be formulating a plan for action. But I haven’t even gotten to one of the most brilliant elements in this entire sequence — you can see other players making this choice in real time! Skydiving and chuting off in all directions, you can almost get an early read on what they’re planning to do.

Even at a numerical level, the amount of players Battlegrounds will pack into any single match makes it’s intentions abundantly clear, saying ‘there are one hundred people here; how many of them can you best?’. Given that you’re able to stay alive, there are numerous opportunities for engaging enemies in each match. Instead of taking things away from the player like most survival games, even to the point of depriving them of people to play against, Battlegrounds says, “fuck that, here’s one hundred ways to die. Go find a gun.”

Battleground’s marriage of empowerment and immediacy continue all the way through the early and mid-game. Looting your way through the map, you’ll find guns and supplies a-plenty, the awareness of eventual conflict hanging over your head as you do your best to prepare as the omnipresent arena restriction timer ticks down.

To say the marriage is set in stone would do a disservice to the elastic nature of the gameplay loop Battlegrounds establishes, owed to the implementation of a constantly tightening ring in which you can foreseeably survive. Entering this ‘blue zone’ equals death in mere seconds after a while. Battlegrounds is going to force you in to situations in which you must put your empowerment to the test, to back up how you fared in the early game with the frenetic and millisecond based gameplay of the late game.

This forms the basis for tension in the game. You know you have to move and be decisive to survive, and you sure as hell know that every single other person on this island is currently preparing with that exact understanding in mind. Battlegrounds internal logic of immediate action creates a loop of tension that is constantly reaching a boiling point and returning to a simmer.

This tension is often expressed in the games use of sound — another calling card of the disempowerment movement, top notch sound design serves as the standout when it comes to the audio-visual design of Battlegrounds. Gun shots pop ominously in the distance or crackle startlingly close, you can hear sniper rifles disturbing the speed of sound between the hilltops. Footsteps on the floorboards above you in a secluded cabin can turn a routine scavenge into a heart-pounding waiting game.

Your empowerment may increase during your initial encounters with supplies and under-equipped players, but then the immediacy grows, forces itself upon you, and your empowerment is met — and sometimes annulled entirely — by other players. This culminates to the incredible feeling of a survived firefight once the dust has settled and you’ve managed to catch your breath.

Remember at the start of this video when I said the thing that defines survival games the most was their pacing? That still stands, but the pacing defined by so many survival games before it made Battlegrounds look around and realise “well there’s a whole lot of nothing going on huh?” and then it air dropped 100 of its players into the mix.

Battlegrounds takes the slow burn, the tedious loop, the lack of player interactivity, and it pushes it to a new limit of pacing. Forcing you to hit the ground sprinting, find your weapon and assert yourself in an ever-shrinking world of conflict, victory, and death. Through janky animations, somewhat unpredictable net-code, and other common trappings of the early-access phase this game somehow still manages to grab you by your gut first and your nerves second, never letting go for a moment.

By unifying it’s ruthlessly immediate action with the admittedly impressive scope of vast survival environments it cements itself as one of the best multiplayer experiences I have ever had, and, quite possibly, the beginning of a new way of understanding survival games.

Thanks for watching. Before I finish this video I want to acknowledge a few other content creators who, while watching the video, viewers could easily draw parallels with. Hamish Black of ‘Writing On Games’ released a video titled ‘Why PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ Violence is Important’ in late May — while Black’s work analyses some of the things I spoke about here, I wrote this script prior to seeing that video. While Black’s thoughts are interesting and true, they don’t have a bearing on this script. That said, if you want more PUBG think-piece content, I would highly recommend his video.

Outside of ‘Writing On Games’, I also want to acknowledge HeavyEyed’s video “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds & the Important of Early Access”, especially for his thoughts on forced progression, and the early access phenomenon in gaming. Again, his video did not impact this script, but I want to pay it some mind.

If you enjoyed this video, I appreciate it if you’d consider subscribing and liking, sharing with your friends, or if you think I’m an idiot, making a counter video so we can get some fresh YouTube drama going. I’m a new content creator here so all thoughts are appreciated, which can be left down in the comments.

Thanks.