What is Player Unknown Battle Ground?

What is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds?

While the full title is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, most people call it PUBG, because it’s not quite a title that rolls off the tongue.

The game itself is a take on the Battle Royale (or H1Z1: King of the Kill, or The Hunger Games) concept - a number of people are released onto an island, last person standing wins. To do that, you’ve got to find weapons, kill people you see, and avoid danger. It started life as a mod for Arma 2, where PlayerUnknown himself (who has the much more sensible name of Brendan Greene) was creating what he wanted to be the definitive Battle Royale experience. He then co-developed H1Z1: King of the Kill, a similar concept for the zombie survival game H1Z1, before moving to Bluehole Inc to work on PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. 

Each match pits about 100 people against each other, some of which can be in teams, while others will be going it alone. Winners receive their prestigious ‘winner winner, chicken dinner’ title, on top of an in-game currency that lets them purchase cosmetic items.

What's the best way to win in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds?

There’s two main tactics for winning in PUBG - go on a rampaging killing spree, or hide away until the time is right. The former will net you slightly more rewards at the end of the game, but it’s negligible. Which tactic you go for depends on your playing style and the guns you find.

Everyone starts a match without a single weapon, they’ve got to scavenge in buildings to find guns, ammo, first aid kits, and so on. If you’re lucky, you’ll find an array of weapons, typically one long-range rifle with a magnifying scope and one short-range weapon like a shotgun. This allows you to choose if you want to go hunting for other players, risking your own life more directly, or hide away and ambush someone who gets too close.

Typically, hiding is the better option - no matter how good of a shot you are, the one map that’s currently available forces players to traverse wide open areas. When making your way through this, hunting another player, it’s not uncommon to have someone turn the tables from an unseen location. Balancing the threat of this with the reward of finishing another player off is the challenge, on top of being able to shoot accurately.

On the other hand, if you’re hiding, you’ve typically got more moments of safety. As mentioned before, the game will use a field of electricity to damage players that don’t move towards certain locations. These are the times where you’re most at danger, because many other players will be doing the same thing, rushing to a safe zone.

What is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ release date?

PUBG expected to fully release in Q4 2017 on PC, although no specific date has been confirmed, but it is currently available in a prerelease state via Steam Early Access. It will also be available on Xbox One in the near future, following a similar path where a prerelease version will be available as a Game Preview, with a full release in 2018. A PS4 release has not been confirmed.

Where can I buy PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds?

As of now, PUBG is only available via Steam. There’s no word on the possibility of a physical release right now, although it’s possible we’ll see a boxed copy when the game launches. Similarly, when it arrives on Xbox One, it will be digital only, but that’s not ruling out physical copies later down the line.

PUBG Mobile minimum requirements

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile game is a persistent online game, so you'll need a connection to the internet to play - be that via mobile network or Wi-Fi - but the lower the ping the better.

The tech specs for Android are Android 5.1 and higher and at least 2GB of RAM. We've played on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and experienced no problems.

The iPhone version needs iOS 9.0 or later, so a full range of iPhone models back to iPhone 5s are supported and iPads back to iPad Mini 2, as well as iPod touch 6-gen.

The game is PEGI 16 rated in the UK; Fortnite is PEGI 12 in the UK.