Impressions of PUBG on Xbox One and X

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, if you haven’t heard of it yet, you’ve must of been living under a rock for all of 2017. This battle royale/light military sim game, seemingly came out of nowhere to sell over 15 million copies on PC. Additionally, it keeps breaking Steam records for the most players on at one time, along with consistently being in the top 5 most streamed games on Twitch and Mixer. If you still have no idea what I’m talking about,  I will give you a brief rundown of what the game is all about.

You and 99 other players are loaded into a plane, and are forced to jump off onto a large map, with the sole objective of being the last person standing. Once you finish your initial plunge onto land, the game immediately becomes a looting frenzy. You run in and out of many different buildings and landmarks looking for any gear, armor, weapons, frying pans, energy drinks etc.  You have to gear up if you’re going to survive, and if you’re lucky enough, you might just stumble upon an M4A1 or a Kar98k.

When the initial looting frenzy ends, that’s where the real fun begins. A blue radiation zone starts to shrink the map size, which slowly pushes all the players together. This leads to some of the most intense firefights I’ve ever had in my gaming career. PUBG will honestly make you shake and sweat from intensity, make you jump when you unexpectedly get shot at, and make you holler out a victorious roar when you finally see the screen say “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner.” Yeah…

Now that you know a general outline on what PUBG is about, let’s move on to the very controversial and newly released Xbox One version. Flashback to E3 2017, Microsoft shocked everyone with the announcement that PUBG is going to be a timed console exclusive on Xbox One, and it will be releasing at the end of 2017. A bold move for sure, and a move that a lot of people didn’t see coming, because at that time PUBG was still an early access title on Steam.

Then came even better news that, developer Bluehole, will have a completely separate team only working on the Xbox version. With that, came hope that us Xbox users were going to get a acceptable product when PUBG finally launched. Well… we were fools for thinking that. Last month’s launch for PUBG on the Xbox One was an absolute disaster. With Xbox 360 looking graphics, a frame rate that can drop to 10fps, textures that take forever to load, and crashes every other match.

Even though PUBG is technically listed as a “Game Preview,” (which is Microsoft’s version of Steam’s “Early Access”) this was still an unacceptable result from a game and a studio Microsoft invested so much in. If you want to see how bad it really was at launch, here is an analysis video for you from DigitalFoundry.

With all the controversy and just the embarrassing state the game was in, Microsoft and Bluehole kicked it into high gear. Since launch, Bluehole has released 5 patches in a little over a month. A pretty impressive feat to do in the console market, because every patch has to go through a certification process to make sure the patch won’t brick the console. Additionally, the game has improved in every single patch in a pretty dramatic manner. With the most recent patch that was released just this past Monday, making a dramatic improvement to the game’s overall user experience. This new patch smoothed out the frame rate, reduced crashing and added the “First-Person Perspective” to every game mode.

But, even with all these patches the game still has many problems. One of the main problems being how much better that game is on the Xbox One X when compared to the standard Xbox One. On the X, you’re not only getting a steady frame rate at 30fps for most of the time, but you are also receiving the extra quirks of 4K resolution, better draw distances, faster loading textures, HDR, and way less crashes overall. Playing on the X is honestly such an advantage to playing on the standard Xbox One right now, that I honestly think X players and standard Xbox One players shouldn’t be able to play against each other.

In conclusion, there is an outstanding game here behind all of the technical issues, even with all the issues mentioned above. I’ve played over 80 enjoyable hours of PUBG since the launch last month. This is because you can’t find this tactical and adrenaline pumping gameplay experience anywhere else, the game really is that fun. And, with Microsoft and Bluehole seemingly supporting it fantastically so far, I can honestly see PUBG on Xbox One becoming a fantastic game down the line. But, until then I would suggest holding off on your purchase until the game is in a more playable state, especially if you’re still using a standard Xbox One.

So, have you guys been enjoying PUBG on the Xbox One? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments down below!