The calendar’s doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer – we’ve reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017. (more…)
UPDATE 2PM: Despite months of testing, the combined excitement of everyone trying to log into PUBG has melted the servers. PC servers in all regions are down. The team is doing what it can but for the moment you'll have to, I don't know, go Christmas shopping for a couple of hours instead.
ORIGINAL STORY 11.30AM: A speedy nine months after arriving on Steam Early Access, this year's multiplayer smash hit - PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG - has launched. Our PUBG review went up this morning in case you missed it.
Full patch notes for the PUBG version 1.0 update, which introduces the new desert Miramar map, can be found on Steam (they're too lengthy to post here). To celebrate the occasion, everyone will receive a free Winner Winner Chicken Dinner t-shirt in the game when they log in.
Let's start at the top: in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, 90 to 100 players parachute from a cargo plane on to one of two islands - either temperate Erangel, which has been in the game since its early access launch, or the desert Miramar, which is new. Once on the ground these players, clad only in whatever rags that loot chests have granted them, raid abandoned buildings for weapons and scramble to kill each other while avoiding a vast forcefield that slowly closes in on a narrow area of a map. Die and you are kicked back to the title screen: survive and, er, you won. That's it. Battlegrounds can be played solo or with a team, in first or third person, but this weaponised form of hide-and-seek is what it amounts to.
This formula has made Battlegrounds one of the biggest games in the world, with a seemingly universal appeal: it is both the game that boosted Steam's presence in China and the game that my friends who play one game every five years are playing. It's a truth apparently unacknowledged that what the world really wanted was paintball-on-demand, and the rewards for the first game to successfully render this experience outside of ArmA mods and H1Z1 spinoffs are apparently limitless.
Battlegrounds is not, on the surface, a particularly elegant game. Its strengths are in scale, not detail, and it has not quite risen above the sterility shared by most games with military sims in their DNA. There are vague gestures at this being some sort of edgy TV show, a flame motif logo that looks like a bad tattoo and a cast of appallingly-dressed mute weirdos. Theme and atmosphere don't matter much here however because these things are provided by the scenario itself and, crucially, by your friends.
"For us, the release of PUBG 1.0 is not the end to anything," CH Kim, CEO of PUBG Corp, told me over the phone (through a translator) earlier this week. "It's just one of the many milestones that we looked forward to accomplishing. We've seen a lot of Early Access games stay in Early Access for a very long amount of time. That's why we made a promise early on that we would get out of Early Access and make our 1.0 release within this year."
That day has come, as PUBG is now officially out of Early Access. The new desert map, Miramar, is live on servers along with the new weapons, vehicles, and vaulting and climbing systems that a lot of players have already been experiencing on the test servers for the past couple of weeks.
If you're diving into Miramar for the first time, we've got a guide to the new desert map here. And, while PUBG has only just left Early Access today, it's natural to wonder what might be in store for it over the upcoming year.
CH Kim told me that, apart from continuing to work on better optimization and performance, one main focus would be on making improvements to PUBG as a budding esport, both for players and viewers.
"We are in the process of discussing with a lot of different production companies around the world to see [what] we could work together on, but we'll be putting in the effort to figure out what different tools and functions we can add to make the process itself more attractive and enjoyable," Kim said.
"When it comes to the in-game rules we are doing a lot of experimenting right at this moment, we've been gathering some of the top [ranked players] in Korea and trying to test out the speed and the size of the blue zone. We tried removing the red zone for certain games, and those are some of the experiments that have taken place so far. And when it comes to the scoring system, because with battle royale you can't just have one match and be over with it, there needs to be a series of matches in order for us to get a winner, we're making tweaks and we're further fine-tuning what to do with the scoring system as well.
"While the core game mechanic itself will remain the same, we feel that throughout this experiment we could have some sort of more established tournament for PUBG next year.
"Or, like, a PUBG league next year," Kim added.
We are the first game that showed the world that this is a genre that could gain wide popularity
CH Kim, PUBG Corp CEO
I also asked Kim about the sudden rush of battle royale games and modes that have been appearing over the past few months, as well as his take on Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's recent comments about needing stricter IP protection in the gaming industry.
"For us, we feel like it's very natural for the genre itself to expand," Kim said. "Brendan commented for some companies that were specifically copying some of [PUBG's] game-specific features. I think he expressed his concerns toward that, but the fact that the last man standing battle royale genre itself is expanding, its something that we feel is very natural. And for us, we feel like [ours is] the first game that showed the world that this is a genre that could gain wide popularity within the gaming industry."
If you're not one of the 25 million people who have already bought PUBG, the price of $30 on Steam hasn't changed as it leaves Early Access.
