When it was announced that PUBG would be getting a new replay system with the 1.0 release, I wasn’t very excited. When you read a ton of PR every day, you get kind of jaded when you see the words “innovative” and “revolutionary.” I honestly figured it’d be some half-baked concept that they might get working in a year or two. When 1.0 came out though, I was surprised. PUBG’s replay is bounds above the competition and might set a new standard throughout the industry in what we should expect from replay capabilities.
A lot of first-person shooters have a replay system. It’s a genre where things happen pretty quick, and without some sort of replay capability, it’d be easy to miss those awesome moments where you get a triple kill, or when you clip through the map and die.
The best I hoped for in the past was a system where you could playback the match with the camera focused on a player. That’s what we get with a lot of killcams, just a look through your enemies eyes as they kill you. With PUBG’s new system though, you get an unprecedented look at each match you play from the moment you start until you die or win.
Also: PUBG Review (PC) — PlayerUnknown’s Battleground 1.0 Feels Like Early Access 2.0
The PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds replay function works by taking a snapshot of a circular 1 km area around the player. Anything that comes within the diameter of that circle can be viewed by the camera during the replay. That means that not only can you see everything you did from a bird’s eye view, you can also view what everyone near you did as well.
As an example, here’s a kill I made on someone on a vehicle:
As you can see we get the regular old killcam trained on my avatar. However, with the replay, we can see the kill from the other player’s perspective.
Or from a more cinematic angle.
During the replay, you can either track a specific player, or you can move the camera completely freely. You can also fast-forward or reward to any point during the match at will.
The robust replay feature of PUBG is obviously going to change how people share their footage. Not only does it let you go back to any moment, so you don’t have to record footage continuously, but it also enables you to stage each scene. This means that you can edit together events from multiple angles, and all you have to do is rewind after each take.
Currently, it seems like the replay and killcam features do suffer some ill effects from network latency, but for the most part, they work as intended. You’ll get times when you die, and on the replay, it looks like the other player was aiming 20 feet to your left. However, for how well it’s working now, I feel confident they can iron out the rest of the kinks in time.
Have you tried out the replay function in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds 1.0? If so feel free to post your videos in the comments below.
