What’s your best PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds story?
Meet Me At The PUBG
This week, William Hughes stopped by to talk about the hottest phenomenon in games right now, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. For him, the key to its success is the way it builds constant tension and fear, essentially turning a multiplayer shooter into a horror game where all the monsters are controlled by other players (and you’re a nasty monster in waiting yourself). It’s a fantastic engine for bringing friends together and generating stories of your wacky, terrifying exploits, some of which Strange Albert shared down in the comments:
One of the things I like most about this game is that every round has its own “story” that your character is playing out:
I parachuted into a farmhouse when suddenly I realized that someone else had chosen the same place. We ran into separate buildings, desperately looking for any kind of weapon to defend ourselves against one another. He got a shotgun, I got a handgun. It didn’t go well for me.
I hid in a bunker with a shotgun aimed at the entrance for tens of minutes listening to the drone of passing cars and the occasional set of nearby footsteps. Fortunately enough, the play area always remained over my position. Until it wasn’t. With four players left, I was forced above ground where there was next to no cover. Just as I saw some hapless player sprinting in my direction, a guy picked me off with a rifle from a nearby hill.
I started in a crappy house that had next to nothing, and the play area was several kilometers away. I’d never make it on foot. Luckily, I stumbled across a working jeep and raced toward relative safety. Along the way, I encountered another player and mowed him down, trapping his corpse on my windshield somehow. Another player was sprinting through the field and could only watch in horror as my car with its floppy corpse hood ornament plowed into him. I drove into a village, where apparently dozens of people were camping. They rained gunfire down on my car, killing me and exploding the vehicle.
For, ahem, Poop Medicine, the game has been an opportunity to reconnect with old friends:
A few friends I didn’t even know played PC games all ended up getting it, so we’ve got regular four-man squads to play with, and it’s a great time. We’re a bunch of old friends, and it’s really fun to just be bullshitting on mics and then there’ll be a pop and we’re all dead silent, then someone yells some coordinates and it’s off to the races. It’s one of those games where you’ll play a round and end up talking about it at a barbecue a full week later. The systems play so well with each other that it doesn’t need any scripting in order to generate memorable emergent stories, even if they just center around “that one fucker we were after” or “those dicks on that bridge.” I like it okay solo, but it really shines if you can talk a few of your buddies into jumping in with you.
One of my guys I play with was mostly just a friend-of-friends who ended up in the navy for a while, so we never really got a chance to get super tight. This game has actually let us catch up and build a friendship. I’m very happy it turned out this way.
And even though Shinigami Apple Merchant has only been watching the game, they ran down an entertaining list of rules for staying alive: