More than 4 million folks are gorging on chicken dinners. Since its release, PUBG continues its march up the most played games list on Xbox One. Last time I looked, it was sitting comfortably at the #5 spot. Today, PUBG is at #3 behind only Fortnite: Battle Royale and Call of Duty: WW2.
But the road towards one of Xbox One’s most played games hasn’t been without its bumps. Performance issues plague the Xbox Preview title. It’s to be expected, and the developers continue to churn out updates addressing random crashes and in-game performance.
Another issue popping up on the Xbox One version has to do with vehicles. Mainly, they’re just too damn hard to take out the driver before they run you over. Especially, in solo matches.
The core of this problem is hard to fix. You don’t have the precision aiming when using a controller compared to a keyboard/mouse. The input lag on Xbox One doesn’t help either.
Bluehole is addressing the car issue by tinkering with the amount of damage vehicles received by gunfire. The devs increased the damage received in an earlier update, and today’s update is going even further.
Here are all the car-related tweaks in the patch notes.
– Increased damage to the vehicle body, and significant damage to the wheels when targeted with gunfire.
– Increased vehicle damage when successfully targeted with a grenade
– Both driver and passenger will suffer increased injuries from crashing into objects or other vehicles.
– Slight reduction to player damage when struck by a vehicle.
They sound good for solo players. But I can’t help but feel vehicles will quickly turn into boxes of death in duo and squad matches.
I was glancing at the PUBG (Xbox One) Reddit when I saw a solid suggestion. Take every vehicle spawn in solo matches and replace them with a motorcycle. It could neatly solve the vehicle problem. First, motorcycles leave the driver completely exposed to gunfire. Second, good luck running people over. And finally, the change would keep vehicles usable in duo and squad matches. Where the issue of being run over isn’t as widespread.
While the vehicle changes are the most obvious changes, it’s the optimization tweaks that I’m pumped to see.
– Continued optimization to controller input lag.
Keep those controller optimizations coming.
The ‘Bug Fixes’ category includes some sorely needed fixes. Here are two that bugged me the most in the past few weeks.
– Resolved issue where inventory may highlight the wrong column when looting.
– Removing the marker from the map when pressing (Y) will no longer switch primary/secondary weapons.
After seeing that suggestion about making all vehicles motorcycles on solo matches, I hope Bluehole ends up going that route. It’s a fix that addresses the problem without overcorrecting it and affecting the duo and squad modes.