PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Creative Director Brendan Greene believes his team can end one of the oldest traditions in competitive shooters: making the game uglier to improve individual performance. It will take a lot of time and effort. But PUBG Corporation, the dev team turned studio handling development of Bluehole’s battle royale shooter, is already implementing changes that could help make Greene’s dream a reality.
This problem doesn’t affect the community equally. Many Battlegrounds streamers still play the game with the graphics settings turned up as high as they’ll go. The powerful gaming PCs assembled by some of the world’s top streamers and content creators are arguably as much of a draw, for some fans, as the personalities and skills on display. But the average PC gamer still tends to play PUBG with everything from environmental textures to shadow resolution tuned to their lowest settings. And players have incentives to continue that tradition, which we’ve seen in practice since Doom and Quake LANs in the mid-90s.
“We want to make it so there’s parity between Low and High settings,” Greene told Player.One.
Players always want to maximize game performance, and in a game like Battlegrounds a faster frame rate, even if we’re only talking about a gap of a few frames per second, can mean the difference between life and death. But the rise of survival games and battle royale shooters has given players another incentive to keep that tradition alive: making sure their opponents aren’t getting the jump on them as a result of differences in the visual presentation.
Shadows and foliage are the biggest culprits. It didn’t take long for PUBG fans to realize shadows didn’t render at certain distances and some foliage didn’t appear when graphics settings were lowered in early builds. So people have been playing a much uglier version of PUBG since shortly after launch because it was the only way to guarantee they weren’t hiding in a bush other players couldn’t see.
“We did the shadow caching recently, which means that now shadows can be rendered up to 450 meters on even Low settings. So there’s no difference in Low or High shadows anymore,” he said.
Greene acknowledged the reality of the situation, noting he’d made similar graphical changes many times over the years. But PUBG’s creative director is optimistic about the future, thanks in part to the growing number of resources at PUBG Corporation’s disposal.
“We have an amazing rendering engineer from Ukraine and he’s been looking through all our code and going ‘Oh, we can change this’ and ‘Oh, we can change that,’” he said. “We’re really doing lots of optimization at the moment. We’re doing lots of optimization passes on a lot of stuff, like the terrain is getting optimized. All our vehicles, their vertices are being reduced. We’re reducing them sometimes 60, 70 percent. So, especially when there’s a lot of vehicles in the same area, it won’t cause FPS drops. Lots of little, low-level optimizations that we’ve been waiting to do.”
Some of those optimization efforts will be evident when previews of the launch build hit PUBG’s test environment later this month. But some changes won’t be ready until after the game leaves Early Access. And any experienced PC gamer knows client performance is never set in stone. It’s always one patch away from major issues. Greene already promised three more vehicles for Bluehole’s battle royale shooter, including a tribute to Volkswagen's iconic camper van, and delivering that content means PUBG Corp. will almost certainly have new headaches to address. But a more fair competitive environment is waiting at the end of the long and winding road ahead. And perceived improvements to competitive balance are always appreciated.
Parity is an admirable goal. But Green also admits such changes may not have the same impact on the competitive scene, a driving force in PUBG’s popularity, if he gets his wishes.
“We do want to get a parity between High and Low. And we will eventually. Hopefully,” Greene said. “But I like to play on High. Even for some tournaments, we considered locking graphics settings. You’re not allowed to play the way you want to play. You’re playing the way we tell you to play. Because then it’s a fair playing field.”
For more on the future of PUBG, check out Greene’s thoughts on mod support and the potential addition of a cinematic camera suite. Or revisit our conversation with PUBG Corp. CEO Chang Han Kim, including an explanation for the lack of rocket launchers in Battlegrounds and insight on the growing pains that come with selling 18 million copies of a game in less than a year.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available in Early Access. The launch build is expected to hit Steam in late December and a Xbox One port is currently slated for Dec. 12.
Be sure to check back with Player.One and follow Scott on Twitter for more PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds news in 2017 and as long as PUBG Corp. supports PUBG in the years ahead.
