PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Xbox One has performance issues

Microsoft and developer The PUBG Corporation are making good on a promise to launch the battle-royale shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Xbox One before the end of the year. The last-person-standing competitive game launches tomorrow into the Game Preview program for unfinished products on the Xbox Store for $30. I just spent a few hours with it, and I think that the intense, frightening encounters have survived the adaptation. That’s going to make for an excellent console experience … once The PUBG Corp is able to do something about the framerate.

I’ve spent more than 400 hours with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on the PC. So I bring a lot of baggage with me to the first console release, but I repeatedly found that this version has a adapted the complex controls for a gamepad in a clever way. One of the big things here is that most buttons have multiple functions depending on if you tap or do a long press. For example, if you tap the right bumper, you’ll toggle between first and third person. If you hold the same right bumper, you’ll have the option to look all around you while continuing to run in a different direction. Or on the D-pad, you can press down to cycle through your health items, but you can hold down to use them.

The developers have crammed so many functions into the gamepad that you would expect to feel overwhelmed. That isn’t my experience. After only a handful of matches, everything started to feel intuitive. I’m already at a point where I hope that other developers borrow some of these ideas for their controller configurations.

I still don’t know how to do some things in PUBG on Xbox One, but I’m confident that The PUBG Corp has managed to get almost everything into the game. And that means that this is the complete experience. I had a moment where I heard someone nearby, was able to spot them running through a house, and realized that they were coming for me. It was horrifying and exhilarating. I fired a weapon and got a few shots in before my opponent retreated back behind the house. I quickly switched to my revolver, chased them down, and took them out with a bullet to the torso.