PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, H1Z1: King of the Kill, and more are part of a popular new genre on PC gaming’s biggest platform where you have to survive a fight to the death on a huge map.
GamesBeat has done these kinds of comparisons with multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs) and digital card games. This time, we’re looking at Battlegrounds and King of the Kill because they are among the most popular releases on PC right now. On a recent weekend, more than 340,000 players were playing developer Bluehole’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds at the same time, according to data-tracking site Steamspy. The peak concurrent players for King of the Kill on that same weekend was 150,000. That puts those games ahead of just about anything on Steam aside from Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which are from Valve, the company that runs Steam.
These games are popular, but what exactly are they? Well, they are last-player-standing shooters. This a genre that’s all about ensuring you are the final survivor in a fight to the death with dozens of other people. Typically, these drop you on an island or a similar map with up to 200 other people (player count varies with each game), and then it is a mad scramble to collect weapons, armor, and resources to maximize your chances of coming out of any gunfight alive. To keep people from camping in one place, these games often corral players in safe zones that get smaller and smaller over time until a handful of people are fighting in a space the size of a couple of houses.
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If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you read or watched Battle Royale, a Japanese book and film about a group of students who are stuck on an island and are forced to kill each other until only one person is left. The Hunger Games books and films built on that concept and brought it into the mainstream in the United States. All the games in the last-player-standing genre tinker with the Battle Royale/Hunger Games formula in one way or another.
Beneath that surface, though, these games are about skill and luck. Individual fights or team battles will require you to hone your precision with a mouse, but all the moments between are just as much about chance. You never know if the next house you loot or person you kill will have your favorite weapon or a rare sniper rifle. You don’t know if the way you’re heading into the circle will have 15 people that spot you immediately or no one at all.
That element of chance makes players want to gamble and keep going even when the odds are against them. That also creates a “just one more match” loop that is a difficult to break out of.
Now that we understand the genre, let’s look more closely at the games themselves:
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
Above: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in action.
Launched: March 2017 (Early Access)
Price: $30
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is the reigning champ of the last-player-standing space, and that makes sense because it is the first standalone release from the person who helped establish this game mode in the first place, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene. Along with developer Bluehole, Greene released PUBG (as many call it) earlier this year. PlayerUnknown had worked on the Battlegrounds mod that spun off from the zombie Arma mod DayZ. Greene then went to Daybreak Games where he helped that publisher build its own Battlegrounds mode for H1Z1 called King of the Kill.
After all of that experience, Battlegrounds is the purest expression of the last-player-standing genre yet, and that has attracted a massive audience. I’ve even called it the most important shooter since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare due to its broad appeal.
PUBG is popular, both in general as well as relative to the rest of the games in this comparison, for a few reasons. It has an understandable and straightforward order of operations. You can watch or play a single match, and you’ll instantly pick up the basics. In each match, you’re supposed to drop from the plane, look for gear, find out where the safe zone is, and move to get set up in the safe zone to give yourself the best chance of getting the drop on someone else.
Other games have many of those elements, but PUBG is more streamlined. But this doesn’t mean you can ditch good tactics — you still need to play smart.
The key thing to PUBG is that it frees up players to put all of their thoughts into processing and planning their actions. For example, planes drop care packages filled with powerful weapons and armor. They draw a lot of attention, so you have a ton of options about how to handle them when one falls near you. If you want to take your chances, you can rush after it and hope you get to it before anyone else (or while everyone else is playing conservatively). You could get set up with eyes on the package and then take out anyone who approaches it. In that case, you’d get the airdrop gear and anything the player was carrying. You could also run away from it or use the sound of the plane to cover the noise from your car engine as you drive off to another point deeper in the safe zone.
The point is that these are the decisions that you are always considering in PUBG instead of thinking about crafting and “should I go look for the right stones to build this bow-and-arrow.”
Streamlining is really about limiting what players can do so that they have time to think tactically. Another example is how your inventory works. You can only carry one helmet, which is not the case in something like King of the Kill. This means you can’t just rush into a fight, take a headshot, and then pop on the next helmet in your bag.
The result of those limitations is a plodding, deliberate game where you have to think through your actions. You can play aggressively, but that works best when you do so in short bursts in situations where your opponent might expect you to try to hide in a bathroom.
And that’s why PUBG is the best of the bunch. The other games in this space either bog you down with distractions that take you out of tactical thinking, or they are nonstop action with no time to consider your actions.
PUBG is taut. Thanks to the evershrinking safe zones, matches will never take much longer than 30 minutes. And having that hard limit, along with the ebb and flow of the matches, frees you up to take chances and experiment with each match. That makes each round unique and keeps you coming back.
Why it still sucks
PUBG is still in the Steam Early Access portal for unfinished games. Bluehole is promising to finish it this year, but for now, it is buggy and janky.
It crashes. It sometimes fails to reload your weapon even when it’s empty. And the spectator mode is often useless. It’s also missing basic functionality — a small fence could cause your death because mantling isn’t in PUBG yet.
Even when you can’t stop playing the game, it’s not uncommon to come away cursing it as a broken turd. That said, I’m always ready to come back to see what’s improved after the weekly updates and the big monthly patches.
H1Z1: King of the Kill
Above: Go ahead and flex. You’ve earned it.
Launched: February 2016 (Early Access)
Price: $20
On the surface, King of the Kill and Battlegrounds are the same game. You drop onto a massive map, you look for gear, and you try to take everyone out while also trying to stay in a safe zone. Again, it makes sense that they are so similar, since they both spawned from the mind of PlayerUnknown. But anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with both can tell you, King of the Kill and Battlegrounds are miles apart.
PUBG is going for a military-sim style of play. It is closer to the Arma side of the spectrum, which is the Bohemia Interactive-developed infantry game that creator Dean Hall built the DayZ mod on top of. King of the Kill, on the other hand, is more of an action-arcade shooter. On the shooter spectrum, H1Z1’s take on this genre is closer to Call of Duty than it is to Arma.
King of the Kill’s matches are nonstop chaos. Up to 200 players enter a map and are randomly dropped in the sky to find a landing spot. Once they are on the ground, it is a mad dash for essential items: weapons, helmets, and vehicles. If you can get a decent rifle, a helmet, and a car, then you are set up for most of the rest of the match.
Where PUBG is about making tough choices regarding the use of a loud car in certain circumstances, you almost always want to use a car in King of the Kill. That way you can roll up on stragglers, jump out of the vehicle, kill them, and move on.
That style is going to appeal to some people more, but I think that it makes for a less interesting experience. King of the Kill doesn’t have a lot of downtime to go with its intense moments. You don’t have time to think because it is all go go go. When King of the Kill does pause, it’s so you can craft special items like armor or explosive arrows. And that distracts from what makes this genre special in the first place.
But King of the Kill does do some things better. It feels less janky. Its animations are smoother, its vehicles are more fun to drive, and loot is easier to spot in the environment.
Oh, and King of the Kill’s loot-box-opening sequence is a million times better than PUBG’s.
And while I appreciate the dedication to tactical clothing and gear in PUBG, I also love the wacky skins you can get in King of the Kill.
Finally, Daybreak Game Company nailed the audio design in King of the Kill. Everything sounds realistic, and the positional audio is crucial for pinpointing enemies around you.
It also still sucks, though
King of the Kill still has a ton of technical issues. Connecting to a server is occasionally a matter of getting lucky. It has wonky hit detection that doesn’t seem like the developers will have an easy time fixing.
King of the Kill’s real problem, however, is one of potential. Even once the game exits Early Access and gets a couple dozen more updates, it will probably have the same core action-packed loop. As broken as PUBG is, it has already surpassed the H1Z1 spinoff and it still has a lot of room to grow and improve.
That doesn’t mean no one should choose King of the Kill over PUBG. You just need to decide if you want the emotional up and down of Bluehole’s game or the relentless shootathon that is Daybreak’s version.
The rest
PUBG and King of the Kill are the biggest games in this space, but they aren’t the only entries. At the same time, I’m putting the others in a section called “the rest” for a reason: They simply aren’t as interesting as Battlegrounds of King of the Kill, or they have some fundamental problems that should keep you from buying them.
The Culling
Launched: March 2016 (Early Access)
Price: $25
In March 2016, developer Xaviant launched The Culling for PC (and for Xbox One earlier this year). It is a 16-player last-player-standing game that has a heavier emphasis on melee weapons and traps.
At its core, The Culling is solid. It has different pace than the other games here because of its smaller match size and close-range combat. It does have crafting, but that can work in a smaller game like this that needs to elongate that period of tension at the beginning of a match — even if I think that the genre is better off without it.
But The Culling’s real issue is that it doesn’t have a huge active player base. On PC, you need 16 people to start a game, and sometimes fewer than that will be online trying to play. It’s a little better in North America or on Xbox One, but you’ll never have to wait for a match with King of the Kill or PUBG.
Ark: Survival of the Fittest
Launched: March 2016
Price: $60 (it’s part of the Ark: Survival Evolved package)
Ark: Survival of the Fittest is another spinoff from a survival game. It is the most crafting intensive entry in this space, which means you’ll spend a lot of time in menus. Like The Culling, it also has small match sizes. You and 23 other people jump into a small circle in the middle and then rush out into the surrounding jungle looking for resources. It’s much more intense because of this, but you also have less time to think and experiment. Every match is a race to the basics, so it can get repetitive.
Also like The Culling, not a ton of people are playing Survival of the Fittest. Matches will start if they’re not full, but I was only finding one or two servers at any one time.
The Mod
Finally, you could still play the original Battle Royale mod that PlayerUnknown built for Arma III. You can subscribe to it on Steam. But like with some of the other games here, not many people are playing it. It’s also an abandoned project now, and PlayerUnknown has learned a lot of lessons that are much more apparent in King of the Kill and then Battlegrounds.
Still, as a legacy of this genre, it’s nice to see where it started.
Conclusion
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is the best you can do. It’s still early in development, so Bluehole could still crap the bed, but that doesn’t negate that it is already an excellent experience right this moment. With its excellent pacing and smart limitations, Battlegrounds is a game that players could sink hundreds of hours into. If it keeps improving without losing that core, it should continue to dominate this genre for a while.
