PUBG Developers Discuss Future Updates After Undocumented Changes Fiasco

PUBG took a bit of a hit this week when undocumented changes to the game that weren’t notated in the released patch notes were discovered by gamers and had a negative impact on the overall experience, so much so that many players took their grievances directly to Bluehole Studios Inc.

Since the fiasco, the team has vowed to be more transparent, and provide more detail in future updates.

“Ever since we launched the 1.0 version of PUBG earlier this year, we’ve been focused on building our team so we can invest in the game’s ongoing development. We’ve been building new content (like Sanhok), quality-of-life improvements (like map selection and weapon balance), and a whole series of aggressive anti-cheat measures. We want PUBG to be the best game possible so players like you keep loving—and playing—it.

Although we’ve made some meaningful improvements to PUBG, we’ve fallen short in other ways. Players have rightfully called us out for failing to address complaints about performance, and recently we haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes we’re making to the game. Today we want to change that by talking in-depth about the things we’re prioritizing. We’ll also tease some of upcoming content we plan to add to the game.”

Here is what was outlined:

Performance and Server-Side Optimization – Over the past few patches, we’ve seen a big increase in complaints about performance problems, including unpredictable FPS drops, visual stuttering, and overall sluggish performance. Some of the root problems are occurring client-side, and others are server-side.

First things first. We’ve identified a few simple fixes we can make to improve overall game performance:

• We’ve discovered that when vehicles move over many different types of ground materials quickly, too many effects are produced, causing players’ GPUS to overload.
• Another cause of GPU overloading (and FPS drops) has to do with the way lighting effects are processed.

We’re already working on fixes for both of the issues above.

We’re also changing the way we ship optimizations. We’re planning to push updates to live servers whenever fixes are ready, instead of simply waiting for major patches. We’ll announce each of these improvements in subsequent patch notes.

Looking more toward the future, we’ve identified quite a number of ways we can optimize different aspects of the game to improve performance holistically.

Character optimization

• We’ll optimize the way the game handles the movement of opponents who you can’t see.
• The vaulting process and animations will also be improved—we believe this will address certain screen stuttering issues affecting low-powered PCs.
• We’ll improve the character model rendering process to prevent some small frame drop issues.
• We’ll optimize character movement and animation while skydiving to improve framerate when multiple characters are skydiving at the same time.
• We’ll optimize parachute animations to cut down on frame drops near the start of the match

We expect the final three changes above will make the early stages of each match feel much smoother. War Mode will also benefit immensely from these changes.

Vehicle optimization

• We’ll optimize the way the game handles unseen (far away) vehicle movement and the movement of player models inside faraway vehicles.
• Currently stopped vehicles demand an unnecessary amount from your CPU. We’ll fix it.

Loading optimization/stabilization

• We’ll optimize the core structures of Miramar and Sanhok to improve map loading speed.
• We’ll optimize physical texture loading while level streaming, which should address screen stuttering issues.
• There’s a crashing issue caused by some level-streaming processes that we’ll address.

Other optimization work

• We’ll address the frame drop issue caused by high-magnification scopes
• Certain other far-away objects will be rendered in a less taxing way
• We’ll optimize the replay system to improve framerate for players who have the replay/death cam activated

• We’ll optimize network code and reduce network latency. As a result, basic player inputs will be revealed to other players much more quickly.
• We’re going to increase the speed at which the server transfers data about objects (items, doors, fences), to address the fact that sometimes item spawn in late after players parachute in.
• We’re going to eliminate some inefficient network code. Currently, some objects send updates to the server unnecessarily
• Currently the server rapidly updates certain frames (on vehicles and character models) in an inefficient way. When we address this, we believe it will also resolve some abnormal physics affecting vehicles.