PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds received its first Xbox One patch Tuesday following the first week of release. Unsurprisingly, Bluehole focused on performance improvements and bug fixes for the battle royale shooter but also went so far as to disable the very limited keyboard support.
The first PUBG patch is available to download on the Xbox One and weighs in at approximately 4.7GB. The game was released to the Xbox Game Preview program just last week, so it will be interesting to see at what pace Bluehole can continue to deliver patches. Players should not be surprised if the next two weeks are quiet, however, due to the Christmas and New Year holidays.
PUBG’s performance on the Xbox One and Xbox One X has been at different levels of disappointing. The framerate is extremely inconsistent and often dips into the low 20s depending on the action, location, and the number of nearby players.
Tuesday’s update does list a “[f]irst pass visual and performance improvements” note along with slightly improved anti-aliasing on both consoles.
Initial reaction from players appears to be varied on how well this patch improves performance. Some in the PUBG Xbox One Reddit thread concerning the patch report slightly improved framerates or no noticeable difference or negative effect. Additionally, the issue with the game crashing while driving vehicles is still present as well and will likely remain until Bluehole works on optimizing memory handling for the console.
The PUBG update mostly revolved around minor fixes like cleaning up animations, correcting various bugs, and making the user interface more communicative by presenting prompts when reload and enter a vehicle options are available. There is one notable and one welcome change, though.
The welcome change is that the motorcycle controls are no longer inverted. This should make the vehicle easier to use since the default scheme flipped this for some reason.
The notable change is the removal of keyboard support. PUBG players noticed they could use a USB keyboard and the Xbox Chat Pad not long after the game launched on Xbox One. The lack of mouse support meant players did not gain a movement or aiming advantage but they could use shortcut keys to equip certain weapons or use certain consumable items like bandages more quickly than pure controller users.
The big question for PUBG is how much more optimization and performance can Bluehole squeeze out of the Xbox One and Xbox One X? That’s the point of the Xbox Game Preview program, however, and it will be interesting to see how the game improves over the coming weeks and months.
