Secret Origins: PUBG and the Battle Royale Arena

For all of the disasters that 2018 has seen, none even come close to the failure that is Fallout 76 . Almost every aspect of Bethesda's multiplayer-focused Fallout SLG game Collectibles has been a catastrophe, not least the game itself. Fans of the series have been seriously let down with Fallout 76 , with the game including some ridiculous bugs and glitches and earning its position as the worst-reviewed Bethesda game in over a dec

I'm at our new @PUBATTLEGROUNDS office in Madison today. The team is working on our desert map. Here's a WIP preview of this new location... pic.twitter.com/ReLbsvwv9A — PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) July 3,

In a May 2017 interview with PCGamesN , Brendan Greene, the man behind the "PlayerUnknown" handle, discussed his initial inspiration for the mod. "I’d seen what Survivor GameZ did with DayZ," Greene said. "[…] It was a great event but I couldn’t play in it because I wasn’t a streamer. I thought: ‘Well, I want to do this. I want to play this’. I had a DayZ mod server that I had scripted lots of stuff into and decided I wanted to make a mod. I just thought, ‘Right, let’s try and make a battle royale mod’, and the genre was born." In its initial form, PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale pitted 25 players against one another in a shared starting area with a cornucopia of gear lying before them. Once the countdown reached zero, the race for life and loot was on! Fun fact: one of the most iconic mechanics of the mod and its successors, the constantly shrinking circle, arose due to Greene’s skill-level as a programmer. "The ever decreasing circle – I couldn’t program squares like it is in the Battle Royale movie," Greene told Rock, Paper, Shotgun in a July 2017 interview . "The code for doing squares that shrink, I just couldn’t do it because I wasn’t a very good coder, right? So I [changed] it to an ever-decreasing circle that sort of moved around inside itself, because that’s how I could do it."

This led to a pretty damaging reaction for Activision Blizzard, including a huge amount of dislikes for Diablo Immortal 's trailers and even a significant share price drop . Activision Blizzard will need to bear this in mind for future announcements, and the publisher may well be rethinking its strategy for those other mobile games it has in the pipel

The year of 2009 is shaping up to be one of the more important years of modern gaming. This was the year that saw the birth of many of the current giants of the industry. It was the year that saw the real beginning of the Assassin’s Creed series, the beta release of Mincraft, and was the year when Uncharted 2: Among Thieves released and blew away all expectations. It’s also the year that saw the release of ARMA 2, the game would come to serve as the spawning point for both PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (aka "PUBG") and the battle royale arena genre in general. Upon its release, ARMA 2 was received as a competent, though mostly unremarkable, tactical shooter. Still, it managed to gain a small, but healthy, following thanks to its wide variety of weapons and realistic ballistics. Left to its own devices, ARMA 2 would have faded into obscurity as its player slowly bled away but that’s not quite what happed. See, the game also happened to attract a strong modding community, one that would propel it back into the limelight three years later.

Fans of the Diablo series have been waiting a long time for a new game, but Diablo Immortal was not what they were hoping for. A mobile-only spinoff of the action RPG franchise, gamers were aghast when the title was revealed earlier this year, dreading the potential for dodgy microtransactions and fearing a move away from the PC focus that Diablo had always maintai

Now onto the new crates themselves. Here is a look (up top and below) at some of the items available in the 2 free-to-open crates. There's an additional one only available during Gamescom that requires the purchase of a $2.50 key to o

All this did was leave the gaming community telling Monolith, " I told you so ." It's a criticism that had been laid at the game at launch and every day since, and so having it sold back to players without an apology didn't do much to salvage Shadow of War . As such, its legacy remains tied to a publisher that delved too greedily and too d

Part of the charm of the game is the way it balances killer and camp counselor, a tightrope act that shouldn't be ignored. Mechanics mesh extremely well with gameplay and give players a variety of options in escaping Jason Voorhees —unless they're lucky enough to play as him instead, a delightful experience that is equal parts frenetic and fun. Sure, parts of Friday the 13th: The Game are disappointing, but it was, for at least a few weeks, one of the most hotly-debated and thoroughly-enjoyed multiplayer titles of 2017, earning it a spot on this l

A lot was expected of Sony's PlayStation Classic. Following on from the success of Nintendo's own retro consoles, the prospect of a miniature PlayStation pre-loaded with the best games that the console had to offer was mouthwatering for some. After all, the original PlayStation had an amazing library of games, and as such this should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for S