Останні рецензії користувача R'mur

The OG battle royale game.

TL;DR: Devs missed the mark for Oceania servers and made it unplayable.

The long version:

I will preface this. I am a full-time worker and a casual gamer. I don't play ranked and I don't get enough hours in a day to practice enough to play in competitive matches. Standard matches for me, always.

I have always liked this game. I bought this game for $20 at the end of the horde-mode games era and it was a nice change with a new, unique gameplay style. I could play solo or with mates and it was always a lot of fun with a lot of laughs. Early Access had a lot of bugs but it was a good experience. I played it for quite some time from when it was in beta right through to 1.0 release and a bit beyond. Every update added something to the game and it was always improving.

Fortnite came along, offering a free-to-play battle royale and people left PUBG in droves. I tried Fortnite and didn't like it. It didn't have the same feeling. PUBG has just always had satisfying gun fights. The footsteps, the distant gunfire, the close-up gunfire. Listening to a shot ring out and identifying what sort of weapon it was and how far away they were, and more importantly, how much of a threat they were to you and your squad. PUBG always looked and sounded GOOD. Even when Apex Legends came along, it never had the same raw combat feeling that PUBG offered.

Times changes, jobs changed, people changed and I stopped playing it for a while.

2022. New job, new friends. We're looking for a game to play. They've never really played battle royale games before and Apex was free-to-play, so we played it for a bit. I still didn't like it and they weren't keen on it either. I then learned that PUBG was also now free-to-play. I was very excited and it was very easy to convince my new friends to get it straight away.

We all loved it. They loved it for the same reasons I enjoyed it all those years ago and I loved it because it had new maps and weapons, and a new levelling system. We played it heaps. Season challenges were fun, cosmetics were good and it was a good time. The normal-mode matchmaking seemed decent enough. For me, who hadn't played it for nearly 4 years and for the newcomers, it was a nice mix of easy bots, other new players and a few veterans that we occasionally got the drop on.

2024, October. We've been playing PUBG on and off for two years. We're ok at it. Not great, not terrible. We get enough victories to keep us wanting to come back to it. And it's always fun.

The game developers release an update (Patch 32.1 https://pubg.com/en/news/7810) which included a server region merge. We're in Australia so we've always been on the Oceania (OC) servers. The new update has merged the OC servers with the Southeast Asia (SEA) servers and it is now all hosted out of a SEA server location. The developer's reasoning for this is:
"As PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS continues to mature and grow, we’ve been looking at the opportunities before us to improve upon the matchmaking experience. As a result, we have decided to merge some of our regions together." -Dev Letter: Region Merge (https://pubg.com/en/news/7676).

We try it out and very quickly realise the PUBG we know and love is not this. We have determined two distinct reasons:
1. The ping. Australia's Internet is hit-and-miss depending on where you're lucky enough to live. On OC servers we would consistently get between 20ms - 50ms ping while playing. Not amazing, but perfectly playable. The first game we played on the newly merged SEA had an average ping of 150ms. The second game we played was around 180ms. It was unplayable. Doors wouldn't open, loot wouldn't appear on the map and the gunfights were atrocious.
2. The matchmaking. The developers claim this change was to improve the matchmaking experience. It has done anything but that. As I stated at the start, I am a casual player. On OC servers, I was mostly matched with other players around my level (Tier 2, level 260ish) and the rest of the match was filled with bots (for better or worse). On the SEA servers, every single player is level capped at Tier 5, level 500 and they are infinitely better at the game than I am. This normally wouldn't worry me as I've come up against the odd max-level player on OC before. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You just change your strategy and deal with it. But couple a match full of max-level players with a terrible ping, and the game becomes utterly unplayable and even less enjoyable.

Since the October region merge update, the developers have released 2 more patches with the most recent one (Patch 33.1 https://pubg.com/en-asia/news/7988) actually rolling back a region merge for America. The rollback was due to poor performance across North and South America. As part of the rollback, the developers stated that while they are rolling back the American server merge, they "will not be rolling back the OC region, and it will remain in its merged state." -Notice Regarding the High Ping Issues After the Region Merge (https://pubg.com/en/news/7865).

The article goes in to detail the reasons behind rolling back the American merge but not the OC one. While I understand their reasoning for it, it doesn't make it any easier for me to accept it. I've played over 1300 hours of this game and have, for the most part, thoroughly enjoyed it. But these recent server changes have rendered the game unplayable and they clearly have no inclination to fix it for the OC region. I only get a few hours every few days to play games and I am not going to waste those precious moments on a game that no longer works properly.

This review is bittersweet as it has reminded me of all the good times I've had in this game, but I feel like I need to state how I currently feel.

Thank you to anyone who makes the time to read this story.

People complaining about the jankiness of unit movements clearly don't remember (or have never played) the original game. This remaster plays exactly how I remember the old Age of Empires, and yes, units do get a bit stuck unless you know how to manage them. Starcraft is the same, as were so many other RTS games of that era. I still have the original Starcraft and Age of Empires installed, so I can definitely confirm the unit movement issues.

I bought this remastered version because the original Age of Empires does not scale well on 1080p monitors and each new update of Windows 10 causes compatibility issues that I'm sick of trying to fix.

Now to the remastered version. It looks very good and runs beautifully on modern machines. The music has been upgraded but still has the original melody and the sound effects have also had the same treatment. It's a blast hearing the same units and music from over 20 years ago, now in crisp HD quality!

The only thing I have noticed is that there are now gather points and the ability to queue troops & research together. As much as the original version didn't have those features, I don't mind that they've been added - it does make the game play a bit better.

All in all, it is exactly what I expected in a remaster and I am glad the developers didn't change the way the game plays too much.

TLDR; Bought Rust back in the day instead of this. Now own both and currently love this. Also, don't be surprised if you die a LOT early on.

I first saw this game on YouTube years ago when it was in very early access. Back then, it was a janky, buggy, novelty, budget game and I thought "meh". At that stage, Rust was more developed, so I bought it and played a thousand hours of it instead. Skip ahead to now and I haven't touched Rust in months, meanwhile a colleague has started a new Ark server and raved about how good the game is, so I thought I'd check it out again. Suffice to say, it has not disappointed.

We're playing on the Crystal Isles map and the world is a wonderful place to explore! If you start out in the South-West corner of the map, it's a fairly easy, friendly place to set up your first base (I say "fairly" because random nasty dinosaurs can still ruin your day). Once you level up and start taming your own dinosaurs, the world opens up so much more. Taming a flying dinosaur or a wyvern is an absolute game-changer! From there, you can explore the rest of the world and start building newer and better bases where certain resources are more abundant.

I'm currently about level 90 (it'll make sense as you start to play) and the game still has SO much more to offer! I can see myself playing this for quite some time yet.

One thing to note, I am playing on a private PvE server (with only about 8-10 players). I would imagine the game would be quite different with hundreds of players, huge tribes and PvP elements added in. I'm not big on PvP (part of the reason I stopped playing Rust) so I have been avoiding those servers.

Suffice to say, this game has plenty to offer and you certainly won't be bored playing it - as long as you slog out the first few levels while everything wants to kill your squishy, soft body.