PUBG Mobile released in North America yesterday, and it’s pretty awesome. But between my own string of victories and the countless chicken dinners on social media, it sure feels like things are too easy.
PUBG Mobile is a robust iOS and Android port of the popular battle royale game that allows 100 players to fight to the death. The mobile version has a convenient interface that makes moving and shooting much more responsive than I expected. Numerous players starting up the game for the first time are kicking ass and coming in first place to earn a coveted “chicken dinner.”
On Twitter, players are marveling over their victories. “Literally the first time that I played PUBG and the fact that I won in mobile version is even more hardcore,” one person wrote. “I’m a god at PUBG Mobile but crap at Fortnite,” said another. This sentiment is common: “First game of #PUBGmobile on the iPhone SE we come out with a big win.”, “First #PUBGmobile Win! 9 kills. ”, “My very first match, first time ever playing PUBG and this was the outcome”.
There’s a catch. Many players, myself included, believe that many of the people you face off with in early matches are actually bots. The main PUBG doesn’t have bots. The mobile version doesn’t state that it does, but in my own experience, I encountered numerous supposed players in the game who all wore the same red shirts and played with the same poor skills. Bolstering this theory is a March 16 article in The Verge, that states that “[o]ne major difference from the other versions is the presence of bots, apparently designed to help new players get to grips with the game. As you level up, the ratio of real players to bots increases…”
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Kotaku has reached out to Tencent and PUBG Corporation to confirm that this is what’s happening.
If PUBG Mobile does have bots, that means that players on social media boasting about their initial wins might have only bested AI enemies, like a gaggle of Westworld hosts tossed into the battlefield for our amusement. There’s been enough excitement over newly earned chicken dinners that a PSA thread was established on the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Reddit late yesterday to warn excited players that their victories might have been assisted.
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I started to notice something was amiss after consistently encountering random players dressed in red shirts. At the moment, you earn new clothing through crates that drop random garments. Far too many people I encountered were wearing the same outfit. No matter where I was on the map, whether in solos or squads, clumsy red shirts would find me, stand in place, and shoot completely around me. By the end of certain matches, I had anywhere from 12 to 15 kills and always came in first or second. I noted on Twitter that the entire situation felt like shooting fish in a barrel.
Players feeling discouraged at the prospect of possible bot-laden matches shouldn’t worry too much. After about 10 rounds and some leveling, I began running into more opponents that were almost certainly players. The final 10 of each of these later matches also appears to be nothing but human players wearing a much wider range of clothing, so if you’ve made it that far and manage to grab the win, you can take pride knowing you bested other players and ruined someone’s day. Still, if those early matches have you choking on chicken dinner, you might want want to hold off on bragging for now.
Setelah dirilis di China dan sempat melewati masa soft launch di Kanada, PUBG Mobile hasil besutan pengembang game Tencent akhirnya memasuki tahap akhir yaitu rilis resmi secara global. Di China, ada dua versi dari game PUBG Mobile. Namun hanya satu dari keduanya yang dirilis resmi untuk dunia, yakni PUBG Mobile versi Lightspeed.
Dari keduanya, versi Lightspeed dipilih oleh komunitas PUBG sebagai versi yang lebih stabil, dan secara keseluruhan adalah versi yang lebih baik. Meskipun begitu, PUBG Mobile versi Timi yakni Army Attack, kemungkinan juga akan tetap dirilis resmi secara global jika game ini mempunyai mode bermain alternatif dan tetap mempertahankan inti dari permainan utamanya, seperti yang dimiliki oleh versi Lightspeed.
PUBG Mobile memiliki peta permainan yang sama persis, dengan yang ada pada versi dekstopnya, yakni PlayerUnknown’s Battleground. Tetapi pada PUBG Mobile, peta permainan lebih optimalkan lagi sehingga dapat dimainkan di mobile dengan lebih baik. Game dengan genre battle royale lainnya seperti Rules of Survival, bisa dikatakan meminjam mekanisme dan struktur permainan seperti PUBG.
Sedangkan game lainnya lagi, seperti Fortnite: Battle Royale misalnya, juga terinsipirasi dari dipopularkannya pertempuran battle royale. Semua game tersebut mempunyai kemiripan item dan senjata, seperti yang ada pada versi dekstop dari PUBG Mobile sendiri.
Pada PUBG Mobile terdapat beberapa mode multiplayer yang dapat kamu mainkan. Kamu bisa memilih untuk bermain sendiri atau biasa disebut solo. Kamu juga bisa bermain dengan satu teman lainnya (duo). Atau mungkin jika dirasa kurang banyak jika hanya berdua, kamu lebih nyaman untuk bermain beramai-ramai (squad play).
Tidak ada in-app purchase yang dapat memberikan kamu keuntungan di dalam game. Jadi semua yang terdapat pada in-app purchase di PUBG Mobile bersifat item kosmetik saja. Bisa dikatakan bahwa PUBG Mobile lebih bergantung pada kemampuan kamu bermain, dibandingkan dengan mengandalkan item ataupun senjata. Di dalam game akan terdapat banyak objektif dan misi harian yang dapat kamu selesaikan untuk mendapatkan hadiah. Hal ini jelas adalah cara Tencent untuk mengambil keuntungan dari bisnis game untuk pangsa pasar mobile.
Walaupun terkesan bahwa Fortnite: Battle Royale adalah salah satu alasan kenapa PUBG Mobile dirilis lebih cepat dari waktu yang ditentukan, dari tahap soft launch kemarin nyatanya memang game ini terasa seperti game sudah siap dirilis. Berbeda dengan versi desktopnya yang justru terkesan sangat terburu-buru dan dipaksakan. Kemarin, saat PUBG Mobile masih dalam tahap soft launch , game ini hanya membutuhkan perbaikan yang sedikit saja, seperti perbaikan efek cahaya dan masalah pada koneksi, sebelum akhirnya benar-benar siap untuk diluncurkan secara global.
Kompetisisi diantara Fortnite: Battle Royale melawan PUBG Mobile akan menjadi tontonan yang menarik untuk diikuti, karena walaupun Fortnite: Battle Royale secara gamblang, benar-benar seperti memindahkan versi desktop dari game Fortnite sendiri untuk kemudian dibuat port untuk dimasukkan ke versi mobile, PUBG Mobile justru terkesan lebih siap. Untuk saat ini, PUBG Mobile justru dibuat seakan game tersebut memang dibuat untuk dimainkan di mobile.
Jangan salah sangka, keduanya memang baik dan tetap akan memberikan pengalaman bermain battle royale yang nyaman untuk dimainkan pada layar sentuh. Jadi, kita bebas untuk memilih, mana diantara kedua game tadi yang lebih bagus untuk dimainkan. Kamu bebas untuk menghabiskan waktu dan uangmu untuk memilih diantara kedua game tersebut, untuk menjadi game favoritmu.
Dapatkan artikel MakeMac lebih rapih dan ringan dengan MM Reader untuk iPhone
Credit: PUBG Corp.
Big news yesterday out of a genre that never seems to stop producing headlines: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has beaten Fortnite to a wide mobile release by dropping an international release of PUBG Mobile on iOS and Android yesterday -- Fortnite is still invite-only, and only on iOS. PUBG Mobile was previously only available in China, and had garnered some positive press for that version. The mobile version of Fortnite, however, no doubt spurred PUBG Corp. to bring it international quicker than it might have otherwise.
The basic pitch for PUBG Mobile is essentially the same as that of Fortnite: the same game, feature complete, just scaled down graphically and operated by touch controls. Fortnite, however, makes the transition a little more smoothly for one pretty simple reason: it's already free-to-play. PUBG, on the other hand, currently costs $29.99 on Steam or Xbox Live. That makes the mobile version an impressive 100% discount as well as a little bit strange.
It makes the messaging a little confusing here. If what PUBG Corp. is really telling us is that we can play a complete version of PUBG on our phones, it makes it difficult to argue that players should be spending the $29.99 to play on console or PC. There are reasons we want to play on those other platforms, of course: it looks and controls better, though early reports indicate that the Xbox One version runs a little less well, overall. It's still a tricky business to convince people both that the game is a complete product on mobile and at the same time worth the $29.99 upgrade to PC or console.
Fortnite doesn't have these problems -- it's the same game across platforms, and you can even bring your progression and cosmetics with you whether you're playing on PS4, Xbox One, iOS or PC. If you like the game on iOS you can just download the more advanced version for PC for the same free price point and experience a more or less seamless transition. Free-to-play was one of Fortnite's advantages over PUBG from the beginning, and that holds true even now that PUBG is free-to-play-sort-of. Fortnite already has the architecture in place for a purely free-to-play title, whereas PUBG is caught in the middle of two pricing strategies.
Having both a free-to-play and a paid version of the same game made sense when the free-to-play version was restricted to China: it's just a completely different market with different consumer behavior. It's just a bit awkward now that the free-to-play version and the paid version are sitting next to each other in the same markets.
