Bluehole and PUBG Corporation are on a tight schedule. Less than three months remain in 2017 and the companies still want to release the launch build of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds before year’s end. And if 20-plus years of watching game development from the sidelines has taught me anything, there’s a good chance it comes down to the wire. But Creative Director Brendan Greene still had plenty of ideas for PUBG’s not-too-distant future when I spoke to him last week.
I met Greene almost three years ago, at the inaugural PAX South, when he was still contributing to the project that would become H1Z1: King of the Kill. Long before Bluehole asked him to guide the breakout hit of 2017, the modder-turned-developer was adamant about several design elements he believed integral to any great battle royale game. One of the most surprising was a lack of killcams, despite their inclusion in Battlefield, Call of Duty and other top shooters. Millions of gamers are used to being told how they’ve died, especially if they’ve been killed by some far off enemy they couldn’t see. Seeing how others approach combat can be very informative for those struggling to learn the ropes of a multiplayer game. But Greene believed a lack of information about death would motivate fallen players to dive into a new round of PUBG, hoping to be the mysterious cause of death for another community member. But it sounds like his stance is softening. In some cases.
“For solo, we’re probably going to add in killcams. Just because we feel it will teach people the game,” Greene said. “It’ll cut down on hacking reports as well if you know, ‘I just didn’t check that corner and that’s where he killed me from’ rather than ‘Someone killed me from outside the house?!’ [...] If it’s duos and squads, no, we can’t do killcams. But definitely for solos we want to do something interesting.”
PUBG Corporation still has to decide how to implement the feature. And that won’t be a priority until after the launch build, which officially has an 11-week timeline to completion, is available on Steam. It’s also not the only camera-related feature PUBG ’s creative director wants to see in the game.
“It’s my aim, hopefully, in the 3D replays to have this cinematic camera mode that you can go back and record and create machinimas with your rounds,” Greene told Player.One.
Greene described a feature that sounds like many content creators’ dream tool. He’d like to give players control of a spectator camera able to move freely throughout the world, enabling the sort of action shots you’d never be able to create during a live setting. And you’d be filming real engagements between real PUBG players. Not just some content creators trying to choreograph a gun fight that looks real enough. Any such feature is several months away (minimum), and couldn’t be implemented until the oft-mentioned 3D replay system is in place. But that has its own hurdles, with bandwidth and storage among the most formidable. According to Greene, the average PUBG match generates about 600MB of data, if the server records every event (non-lethal damage, kills, explosions, etc). That total could go up in custom games… or if an entire community was constantly trying to download that data for its own creations.
“Everyone wants everything. But there are these other costs that people just don’t seem to think about,” he said. “But, you know, I didn’t think about them until I started making games.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is currently available in Early Access. The launch build is expected before the end of 2017 and an Xbox One port is slated for early 2018.
Be sure to check back with Player.One and follow Scott on Twitter for additional PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds news in 2017 and however long Bluehole supports PUBG in the years ahead.
