I don't really like Fortnite, but I'm really really happy for Epic's success. PUBG was a flaming dumpster heap that only caught on because the Battle Royale mechanic is naturally fun and people were clamoring for that type of game. But it was an unqualified mess from a subpar developer, and that always annoyed me because gamers deserved better. Now Epic has been rescued from sliding into obscurity and they've got massive coffers to continue working on Unreal 4. Couldn't have worked out better.
While I agree that PUBG is a dumpster heap technically, it really is a legitimately fun game. I enjoy it much more than Fortnite, and if it performed halfway decently it would be one of my favorite games of all time. I think Fortnite's success is great and it is very clear why it is more popular than PUBG could have ever hoped to be, but I will always be partial to the slow, suffocating, horror of feeling alone in that giant world. Not seeing someone for 10 minutes, but always wondering who is around the next corner is thrilling to me and it's something that Fortnite intentionally lacks.
I'd like to add gun mechanics. PUBG has the best gunplay I've ever played. For me PUBG fights are thrilling, like I was there getting shot at, while Fortnite's (or any other game for that matter) are plain old arcadey. I dislike the building mechanic too.
I'd genuinely love for a developer to step up and do a better milsim BR but so far PUBG is king in that niche.
cod blackout is significantly better mechanically, and just as much of a 'milsim.' twitch has largely pivoted already.. CSGO has a BR now, too.
PUBG doesn't have much special left, and its new peers haven't been very successful at unseating fortnite for popularity.
The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game modes also help elevate it above the chaff.
[0] At the time of writing, fornite has ~10x as many twitch viewers as pubg.
> cod blackout is significantly better mechanically, and just as much of a 'milsim.'
I beg to differ. It has a pretty arcadey gunplay (well... it's CoD). Nowhere near close to PUBG's ballistics. It's pretty much point and click. I can see the appeal, but it's not for me.
Calling it a milsim though...
> twitch has largely pivoted already..
At the time of writing PUBG has more viewers on Twitch.
> PUBG doesn't have much special left
Disagree. It's a niche, but one no game has been able to fill. Every single player I know that left for Blackout ended up coming back to PUBG. It's still its own kind of game.
> The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game modes also help elevate it above the chaff.
Mate, you don't have to defend Fortnite so vehemently. I know it's probably a great game, I just dislike it and no amount of talking will turn it into my type of game.
Tell that to anyone who has a kid playing Fortnite. They're either spending money or declining to spend money constantly. Fortnite is free in the sense that it's free to walk into a bar.
I've really enjoyed my 20hrs+ playing fortnite without spending any money through the platform. I'm happy for other people to pay for useless items and subsidise my experience.
pubg also tries to encourage you to buy cosmetic items, and I know that people's kids feel they have to do this.
But I have never paid a dime and I pwn them all the time.
The parents should simply tell their kids no, and to git gud. I am a parent too, this isn't at all a hard thing.
PUBG definitely took a lot of inspiration from Arma's gunplay, although for whatever reason the glitchy jankiness in Arma annoys me less than it does in PUBG. Maybe because the bugs in PUBG tend to have a greater impact on the outcome of fights.
PUBG was a truly unique gaming experience. It’s just a shame that they were so slow to rollout maps and make basic mechanical changes early enough. I got oversaturated and haven’t played it in about a year. Just can’t dedicate 15 mins on a single match to die from technical shortcomings.
It was the multiple gigabyte steam updates that ruined this game for my group of friends. Coming home from work to find that someone has four hours worth of downloads before you could all play together? We moved on to more reliable pastures.
Try it again, it's come so far in the past year. They've also just released a new snow map. I've been playing for more than a year now and I've never had more fun than I'm having now. For the first time in a year, its playerbase is starting to grow again also: https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
As a big fan of Fortnite I was ready to disagree with you but that's actually spot on. There is a massive difference in the pacing of the two games, and there are audiences for both.
I play PUBG Mobile, so slightly different to PUBG on Desktop. It is free, and it is fun. And it is one of those rare games you can finish the match in 5 - 10 min times when you are in Arcade Mode. There is no grind, no VIP system, No Pay to win. I actually brought a few items in App because I thought I was enjoying it so much and not paying for it.
I hope Fortnite and PUBG will finally wake Apple up, I mean even Phill Schiller is playing Fortnite [1]. Gaming is driving the PC sales, Mac needs to take notes.
Yeah, a lot of it really comes down to personal preference. PUBG, H1Z1, Fortnite, Blackout, CS:GO... gameplay wise they all have significant differences.
PUBG has helped me recover from anxiety & panic attacks.
Background: I had undergone a major cervical spine fusion surgery to avoid becoming quadriplegic[1] & have been forced to close my startup which I have been running for ~ 5 years. I have been facing anxiety & panic attacks ~ 3 months after surgery.
I had decided to try gaming to aid with the recovery from panic attacks & also to monitor the dexterity of my fingers. I looked for multiplayer TPS games with some realism & accurate weapon mechanics. Fortnite was too colourful & lacked realistic maps (IMO); so I chose PUBG.
Initial game sessions made my anxiety worse, especially when a sniper takes you out (or) the impending threat of it. After several sessions, I've learnt to be calm & have improved my tactics.
I can definitely say that playing PUBG has definitely helped me recover from my anxiety & panic attacks. Of-course, this might have been the case even if I had played other games including Fornite; but as I said PUBG served my needs.
So glad I found someone else who also got help from games for their anxiety and panic attacks. I've also undergone some crappy health-related stuff this year and the only thing which I believe pulled me out of it and fixed my crippling anxiety while I recovered was Just Cause 3. I think it was the wingsuit flying coupled with the open-world exploration. It was basically the only activity which could bring my heart rate down to the 60s (It's very counter-intuitive, even for me, how a fast-paced game managed to calm me down) . Not even reading had this effect on me. My friends don't play games and I'm not social at all (twitch, xbox, etc..) so I'm very glad I see someone else in a similar situation.
Sounds great, BTW there was a reddit AMA from a therapist who researches the intersection of video games & mental health[1] the comments section includes several people who share similar experience as us.
I'm planning to try out JC3 for it's interesting game mechanics as you pointed out. One thing I noticed after getting hooked to PUBG was, story based gaming doesn't interest me anymore; I used to be an avid gamer before my entrepreneurial commitments, I would definitely finish the games.
Not sure if it is 'endless' nature of PUBG or similar games, which doesn't give the content of having finished a game; makes one hooked to them. I had got NieR:Automata for it's philosophical adventure, but I didn't get back to it since I touched PUBG.
P.S I wish good health for you in the coming years.
This is really interesting a surprising to read. I play fortnite and I feel like overall it has raised my stress levels a bit. Maybe I need to learn from you and practice being calm, or just get better at the game :)
PUBG is a technical mess (but getting better). However, it's a marvel of game design, especially if you've spent more than a few hundred hours playing. The design of the new map (Vikendi) is insanely good (save for a few issues with loot spawning) — in size, topography, speed, etc.
They've been able to capture the realistic military style sim, but without the massive player overhead required to learn and be good at those games. The gun mechanics are some of, if not the best I've ever played.
I think you're missing a lot of what contributed to Fortnite's success. Namely their ripping off of pretty much every one of Valve's most lucrative decisions of the past 10 years and in principle - Free to play.
Fortnite was pretty much a failure when it first launched. Sure they copied PUBG's last-man-standing game mode, but what really made it take off was that you didn't have to pay for the game.
You could get it, play it, and then upgrade or not upgrade your character as you desired. This is what made it so wildly popular with its base audience of 7-15 year olds. They can't drive, they don't have money, they might have hyper controlling parents that won't let them go out and be proper kids, but if they have a desktop and a reliable internet connection, they can be a part of this game. That's a big selling point for kids. Not to mention if they watch Twitch/Youtube, it would appear to be a potential career path for them to sit on their ass consuming content in an interesting way as they see people like Ninja and Muselk getting rich.
As for Fortnite's financial success, again I think this comes down to them ripping off Valve - principally Team Fortress 2. When Valve made the game free to play in 2011, they added other monetization mechanisms like premium cosmetics and taunts. This is exactly how Fortnite has become so huge.
Instead of having major entrance barriers like having to own a console or forking over $60 - $100 for a game. You can get it for free and maybe pay a few bucks here or there when it suits you. And parents love it because it gives them a passive way to control their kids at little to no cost. (Unless their the absurd type of people who pay for Fortnite tutors)
Not that Gabe Newell or Valve need the money, but Epic has ripped off almost everything from other games for Fortnite. With their massive budget they're basically like Facebook in that they can steal any concept to be produced in house and fight legal battles as necessary. And I think their success compared to what they've ripped off is largely a matter of timing with the rise of services like Twitch, Youtube and Discord than anything specific to their IP.
Not even a desktop; a phone, tablet, console, and god knows what else they release it on.
I think another major contributor to Fortnite’s success is the scale of cross-platform play that we’ve rarely seen before. Chances are if you have a thing that can connect to the internet, that thing is capable of running Fortnite.
They’re like Facebook not just because they have the money to steal any concept and build it in house, but because in some ways they are a social network. It’s as much as a game as a platform to hang out with your friends and chill.
Yeah definitely. When I said "a desktop" I was trying to say pretty much any desktop, even you mom's 15 year old Dell Dimension desktop, which many phones these days are more powerful than - and the majority of Fortnite's players are younger than.
I also agree about the social network angle, the one area Epic has really shined is their season and special event model. While other games have special events and it's really nothing new, the consistency with which Epic produces them creates a constant buzz around the product. Like rugrat water-cooler talk. And some of their events only last a day or two, so if you take a week off for a vacation, you may miss some major thing that your friends may be talking about for who knows how long. Granted this might be intentional addiction fostering aimed at kids by Epic.
Unreal Engine works on linux, and Fortnite used to work through wine, but because of their anti-cheating system it's broken now, and their CEO doesnt seem to have any plans for the linux version, he has some weird stance [1] on that.
Awesome comment! One thing I have problem with is that you keep saying "ripping off" or "steal". There really shouldn't be any shame in taking 2 existing good ideas and using them to make something better, something widely successful.
TF2 or PUBG could've done this but didn't, fortnite did, and nailed it, and now we all get to benefit.
One thing I'm glad they didn't "rip off" from Team Fortress 2 are the gambling loot boxes where you pay $2 for one try which has a 0.02% chance of netting you a $1500 item.
What’s your point? Fortnite combines elements from many other games and you call this a ripoff? This is how "art" is created in many cases. F2P has been around for a long time, so what?
I'm going to make an assumption and say that you may have strong feelings against Fortnite, and maybe feel as though it has wronged other longstanding titles. This may be incorrect, but regardless your statements regarding Fortnite and Epic Games are a bit misleading.
To begin with, comparing Fortnite to what Valve has been doing lately is a bit strange. Valve has recently focused less on being a developement company and more on their platform/marketplace (Steam) which is the primary driver of their success. Valve in the last few years has been for the most part fairly been irrelevant in the game development industry. A more apt comparison would be Epic and Bluehole (which both created the most popular Battle Royales).
You also state that that Fortnite was both a "failure when it first launched" and "what really made it take off was that you didn't have to pay for the game." Fortnite's Co-Op PvE ran an alpha back in 2014[0], and only entered Early Access in 2017[1] (which cost $40). By no metric was it a failure, and comparing the pre-free to play numbers to after it got popular (with a totally different gamemode) is unfair. Fortnite's free to play battle royale gamemode was not a failure and grew extremely quickly after it's release[2].
What made the game popular with its base audience (initially popular with adults and teenagers and only later being picked up by kids) was the fresh and unique take on a new genre (Battle Royale) that was extremely easy to pick up. It definitely wasn't that they could upgrade their character's cosmetics, a option available in basically every multiplayer. Fornite's financial success does come from selling cosmetics, but implying that cosmetics in video games was an idea developed by Valve is laughable. Sales of virtual goods in video games has a very long history[3].
Fortnite popularized (and capitalized on) a fresh genre, which combined with a low barrier to entry, revolutionized the gaming industry and generated immense wealth for Epic, which struck gold with the game. If it wasn't Fortnite, another well made Battle Royale could have easily overtaken the genre in a similar manner. Fortnite was simply in the right place, at the right time, with the right devs. And they've been rewarded handsomely for it.
The issue with Dayz, H1Z1 and PUBG was that they were made by developers that 1. knew very little about engine optimizations and 2. rushed to add features as quickly as possible with no foresight.
This lead to all 3 games being laggy, which is quite bad for a shooter. It also lead to the pace of development slowing down to a crawl after a few months, which I assume was due to their spaghetti code being hard to work with.
Epic at least has experience with game engines and development, and have managed to keep up the pace and performance.
Pubg has a lot of genius to it that people don’t notice because the implementation was buggy. If you play the game a lot you start to appreciate how good the gunplay is, the weapon balance, the layout of the maps. Every building and bush is carefully considered. Ever notice a tree branch often obscures a window you want to peek? No accident!
That's just good production values that most AAA shooters like CoD and Battlefield have. AAA studios can iterate, hire top talent and do a lot of QA testing, so naturally elements like gunplay, weapon balance and map design can be top notch.
I think the genius in PUBG can be found more in seeing the opportunity of creating a standalone realistic Battle Royale shooter at the right time.
That's true! I heard it termed as a minecraft-meets-DayZ.
I've been a fan of the "battlegrounds" gameplay mode since I played on Arma 2 Battle Royale servers back in 2012. I'm really glad they became mainstream enough for me to start sucking at them.
I dunno. I really like Epic and the Fortnite general tone, but as a mobile player I very much prefer PUBG. For one, even with all the talks about bad optimisation, PUBG runs (or at least at the time of launching ran) way better than Fortnite. Fortnite was totally unplayable on iPhone 6S whereas PUBG ran smoothly. Another thing is that Fortnite mixes players from various platforms and thus had to add autofire to the game which ruins the gameplay for me.
Comparing the mobile products is a bit unfair. The mobile version of Fortnite is the same game as the console or PC versions. If you try both the mobile and full version of PUBG it is clear that the mobile version is pretty stripped down. The most obvious difference is probably the interiors of buildings.
It's been a while since I tried it but I recall the mobile Fortnite having control options that let you turn off autofire. I'm also pretty sure that matchmaking between mobile and other platforms is opt-in [0]. You shouldn't be up against PC players when you're on your phone.
> PUBG - an unqualified mess from a subpar developer
Wow, you're bitter. Are you talking about Brendan Greene or Chang-han Kim?
They wanted to get the game out quickly and with a low budget, and they achieved just that! It's strange to be dissing individual creators of a very successful product in comparison to a big company like Epic games.
> "Gamers deserve better"? What is that supposed to mean?
It means they deserve better than all the garbage that's been pushed out over the last 5 years or so since Unity and Unreal became free, and Steam relaxed its submission standards. There's been a massive wave of terrible "games" that people are just forced to accept because they don't know any better.
I'm not hating on indie game devs in general, there are of course plenty of amazing ones. But the real problem is this trend of a small group of devs forming a "studio", coming up with really ambitious plans for a huge game after learning Unity for a month, and then releasing early access garbage like PUBG and abandoning it when they realize making a triple-A game takes years of effort by a vast team of expert professionals.
There would be no Fortnite if it wasn't for Brendan Greene aka PlayerUnknown, who is basically single-handedly responsible for creating the Battle Royale game genre. I see no problem in him attempting to make some money on his creation before a AAA giant comes in and sucks the air out of the room.
It's been a point of contention recently, the question of who created battle royale. Perhaps Greene is responsible for the modern iteration of it, but the last-man-standing concept has been around in gaming since Bomberman in 1983. And the concept of battle royale in general was popularized with the Hunger Games and of course the film named Battle Royale. And, "battle royale" as a phrase was used by Ralph Ellison in 1952 in his classic novel Invisible Man, describing a free-for-all boxing match that the protagonist must participate in. So Brendan Greene didn't come up with this out of thin air, or at least he wasn't the first.
On the other hand, I see no problem with him trying to profit from it either.
Edit: I correct myself -- in Invisible Man, the phrase was "battle royal," not "battle royale." It's still clearly similar however.
Bomberman shrank the arena when the matches went to sudden death. Pretty sure others also did this (certainly common in single player games of that era and earlier - arguably Joust with it's rising lava is close to being the first for that sort of thing)
While Battlegrounds was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million units by the end of the year,[18][19] and is considered the defining game of the genre.
That's what the grandparent was saying: Brandon Greene, the man mostly responsible for PUBG was also responsible for H1Z1 (SOE licensed the Battle Royale mode from him for H1Z1 and hired him as a consultant):
https://www.pcgamer.com/battle-royale-modder-brendan-greene-...
That's a mighty large statement. He may have made one of the most popular games but he certainly did not come up with the idea in gaming (Minecraft mods based on movies) or in movies (Battle Royale is a Japanese movie from 2000).
So your problem is that beginners make things and you have to sift through it on day zero without the help of reviews, and/or aren't aware of Steam's generous refund policy.
Excuse me if I find that viewpoint to be very disrespectful to indie developers. I know there is a problem with "asset flippers", but you have to take the good with the bad. Open access is not a bad thing.
Indie devs are honest people just trying to express themselves. If anyone "deserves" anything, it's the indie dev to not be treated like shit by their customers. They don't make games with the intent of getting huge and annoying 1% of the self-identified "hardcore" gamers with their idiosyncrasies. They are just trying to do their best with the resources they have. Sometimes (rarely) they hit on a recipe that captures the zeitgeist and makes them grow way far out of control for what they are prepared for. That doesn't mean they deserve to be bitched at our told they are screwing their customers.
It's difficult for me to imagine a game that 50 million people bought and played for several hours as "crap". It has its warts and there are certainly things I don't like about it, but 50 million people don't accidentally buy Shaq Fu or Big Rigs or whatever is the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game.
