I was previously unfamiliar with PUBG, but saw it being played on Twitch a bunch. Between seeing the positive times streamers were having, as well as being a fan of survival games, I decided to give it a shot.

For personal context, I've played several online survival games in the past, including ArmA 2's DayZ mod, the DayZ standalone, some of the survival mods in Arma 3, H1Z1, and State of Decay. I found a fairly significant amount of enjoyment from most of them; but there were always compromises to be made. For example, DayZ (both mod and standalone) was immersive, but jank AF/ArmA AF. H1Z1 had fun gameplay, but I personally didn't enjoy the basebuilding, nor did I feel it to be very rewarding. Et cetera.

So far, I find PUBG to be the strongest balance of gameplay and immersion that I've yet encountered. Each round goes so quickly that, if you die, you can easily jump into a new match immediately without feeling the loss too hard. That in particular was among my chief complaints with DayZ - a "round" could take you upwards of 10 hours, an if/when you died, you could easily lose everything. Loot in PUBG is plentiful and powerful. You can find yourself fully equipped after just one house; but keep looking, because there's a broad variety of loot to find.

I have yet to win a round (you get air dropped in with ~90 other players, and the map gradually pulls you all to a concentrated area, similar to H1Z1), but have come in the top 10. The shooting itself feels pretty good, somewhere between the tactical shooting of the ArmA games/mods, and the arcadey feel of something like Rust. You can survive an attack if you're careful; but skill is rewarded, headshots are effective.

Anyways, this is just a quick initial impression. So far I'm fairly positive on PUBG, going to keep playing and write a real review later!

<3

My buddy was watching a stream of this, and it seemed like a good concept executed well. Not my type of game at all but I can appreciate what it's doing.

I don't like that it's third person because it encourages camping around rocks and trees too much, then abusing the camera angle to find where people are. I think that is lame and breaks the flow. I plan on checking in if they add first person only matchmaking.

I played it for 90 minutes and then refunded it, the gunplay has a good feel to it and graphically it's pretty nice.

Entertaining to watch other people suck at.

I might pick it up in a few months when it's a little more polished, if I have some friends to play with.

I really love Battle Royale, but the few games I've watched of this (Northernlion LP) have been 15-20 minutes of wandering around getting gear and then dying before using any of it.

@hankrazorbeard: These ones are more interesting, there seems to be some amount of intentional hamming it up on the main runs:

I'm really enjoying it and it feels like a much more accessible version of DayZ or H1Z1.