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Blog entry by Makayla Dunrossil

Secret Origins: PUBG and the Battle Royale Arena

Secret Origins: PUBG and the Battle Royale Arena

Despite being in early-access, PUBG is already an overwhelming success. It regularly dethrones League of Legends as the most streamed game on Twitch. It will be seeing a console release on the Xbox One by year’s end, and it seems to have cemented the battle royale arena as a fully-fledged genre in gaming. Major studios are already taking notice, with games like Grand Theft Auto Online and Fortnite adding battle royale game modes of their own. From starting as a mod-of-a-mod to serving as the basis for several major games, the journey this genre has undertaken thus far is already quite incredible. This is really just the beginning though! Who else out there is looking forward to seeing where these games go next?

Sure this is far from that "meat and potatoes" we were talking about when discussing these two titans, but Fortnite's price point, or lack of should we say, has always been a big caveat. To this day PUBG still retails for $29.99 dollars, and that remained its price point long before it was a finished game, when it was a buggy mess back in Beta. Fortnite on the other hand has been a complete package since day 1, and has always been free with a fair micro transaction system that has been adapted all over the gaming wo

When engaging someone in a long-range fight it is important to either have a long or mid-range scope on your rifle. That way you can make accurate shots from the elongated distance rather than using a short-ranged scope. After finding this scope understand that you don't always have to have the long-ranged sights on your weapon. Keeping it in your inventory space may seem like a waste but being able to switch to it quickly can give you an edge in a fight while not limiting your close-quarter combat. And when beginning a long-ranged encounter immediately switch to your single fire option on your rifle. This will mitigate any unnecessary recoil when firing multiple shots. It will also help players note the prevalent bullet drop feature in the mobile game adaptations. Forcing them to adjust their aim if necessary. Taking all of these notes into account will help players utilize the multi-faceted style of the assault rifle more effectively. And increasing the amount of wins players are achieving by an exponential amo

In a May 2017 interview with PCGamesN , Brendan Greene, the man behind the "PlayerUnknown" handle, discussed his initial inspiration for the mod. "I’d seen what Survivor GameZ did with DayZ," Greene said. "[…] It was a great event but I couldn’t play in it because I wasn’t a streamer. I thought: ‘Well, I want to do this. I want to play this’. I had a DayZ mod server that I had scripted lots of stuff into and decided I wanted to make a mod. I just thought, ‘Right, let’s try and make a battle royale mod’, and the genre was born." In its initial form, PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale pitted 25 players against one another in a shared starting area with a cornucopia of gear lying before them. Once the countdown reached zero, the race for life and loot was on! Fun fact: one of the most iconic mechanics of the mod and its successors, the constantly shrinking circle, arose due to Greene’s skill-level as a programmer. "The ever decreasing circle – I couldn’t program squares like it is in the Battle Royale movie," Greene told Rock, Paper, Shotgun in a July 2017 interview . "The code for doing squares that shrink, I just couldn’t do it because I wasn’t a very good coder, right? So I [changed] it to an ever-decreasing circle that sort of moved around inside itself, because that’s how I could do it."

Ever since it parachuted onto the scene, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been proving itself to be a force to be reckoned with in the gaming landscape. It’s a meteoric rise not seen since Minecraft made its early access debut back in 2009. With thousands of streamers broadcasting their skills and new players jumping in every day, its popularity is well on its way to rivaling that of the sandbox juggernaut. Where did this kind of game even come from though? New styles of gameplay don’t just spawn from the ether; they all have their origins. In the case of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and the battle royale arena, it all started with a minor PC shooter called ARMA 2.

When it comes to the technical aspects of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on PS4, those looking for an experience rich in graphical and sonic fidelity will walk away sorely disappointed. It must be noted, though, that unlike the way in which the title released through Xbox Game Preview about a year ago, PUBG on PS4 is at the very least stable, despite the sporadic environment bugs and avatar errors that can generate weird, but brief glitches. Plus, it manages to run at a decent frame rate for the most part, save for some isolated instances of stuttering and slowdown when certain areas are highly populated with players at the beginning of a ma

After the mod transitioned to ARMA 3 and took-off in earnest, Daybreak Game Company (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) took notice and started development of a battle royale mode for their then upcoming game "Just Survive" (formerly "H1Z1"). In relatively short order, the developer invited Greene to their studio to ask if they could use his mode in the game. Greene agreed and they wound up bringing him onboard the project as a consultant. Just Survive’s battle royale mode would come to be known as "H1Z1: King of the Kill" and helped popularize the fledgling game genre even further.

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