The Game Director of PUBG has said that he wants to ‘kill the critics’ of his game. Blimey. Say how you really feel.
In the E3 Coliseum, game director Brendan Greene told Geoff Keighley that he wanted to ‘kill people that said PUBG was an asset flip’.
He explained: “Of course we use props from other places. We had to make a map within about nine months and you don’t do that without using work from other artists. But for the most part, most of our stuff is made by hand. So I see these comments and I’m like… ‘I want to kill you’.”
You can see the conversation here.
Ryan Rigney, communications lead on PUBG, took to Reddit to defend the game further.
In a lengthy post, he wrote: “The first thing to understand is that if you’re just starting up a team, you’ve got to lean on asset store work because that’s the only way you can spin up a game fast, and for a reasonable price, to quickly find the fun.
“Hiring an art team of 40 people to ‘try a game’ and ‘see if it’s fun’ is simply not a smart way to work—this is what the asset store is for! It’s a great resource for teams that want to work smart.
“From the beginning, our first map (Erangel) was a combination of in-house work at our HQ in Korea, some direct purchasing of assets, and outsourced art work from a team based in the American midwest. Basically, a few Americans built the Military Base on Erangel. That went so well that Korea decided to build a proper PUBG Corp. studio in Madison, Wisconsin for an in-house art team.”
He continued: “We also re-used some things from Erangel in Miramar. One of our lead artists (a guy called Dave) puts it this way:
“‘Why should one of my artists spend two weeks on a generic sculpt if they could instead spend that two weeks adding real value for players elsewhere? How many times should a telephone booth be modeled? How many times do we gotta sculpt a cash register?’
“Although a map like Miramar is a combination of in-house and external assets, the majority of the external assets are adjusted by our artists after the fact for visuals and for optimisation/performance.
“Because we’re steadily investing more and more in building our internal art teams (along with lots of other teams), Miramar used fewer external assets than Erangel, and Sanhok used fewer still. Our fourth map, the one coming out this winter, uses fewer still, but if we’re smart it’ll almost certainly still involve some mix of assets from different sources. This is a good thing.”
When Brendan Greene was asked by Geoff Keighley his thoughts on Fortnite, he said: “I have many thoughts”. Much to the amusement of the crowd.
“No, it’s great, I mean it’s great that the battle royale space is expanding, and that Fortnite is getting [the] battle royale game mode into hands of a lot more people. So, you know, it grows the genre. That’s it, really.”