The rules and regulations of competitive, online games are a fluid, dense fog. The latest evidence: the PUBG ini files.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds added fog recently. It’s a client-side effect, rendered for everybody, with pretty efficacious results. The fog is visible from about 20 metres, and once you go past 50 metres? It’s pea soup. You can’t see a damn thing.
And it’s a linear fog too, which means that it’s the same literally everywhere on the island of Erangel. You go in a particularly long building, like a warehouse, hospital, or school? You’ll not be able to see the end wall.
Let me just wind back for a second, though: it’s a client-side effect. Rather than an intensive, server-side rendering job, of filling the island with realistic particle or volumetric fog, it’s just a simple mask that sits on each player’s client to obscure the view at varying distances.
Which means the sneaky players have figured out how to turn it off, by editing their PUBG ini files.
Previously, tinkering with the PUBG ini files wasn’t a problem. Players were using them for innocuous things like setting specific memory ceilings, to try and eke out as much extra performance as they could. This was particularly important for players with lower-end systems or not very much RAM, and made the biggest difference around dense, building-filled areas. (And if you’re having performance issues, try this.)
But now you can use those PUBG ini files to disable the client-side fog, to gain an unfair advantage over players who can’t see Sosnovka island from the shores of Erangel.
And because it’s not easy for Bluehole to determine which PUBG ini file modifications are harmless and which are devious, sneaky exploits? They’re all banned.
Don’t believe us? Check out the subtle change to PUBG‘s FAQs, with props to Redditor Defying for spotting the change. It’s probably best undoing all your ini file changes now, just to be on the safe side, given that Bluehole have banned over 150,000 cheaters in recent months.
https://twitter.com/PLAYERUNKNOWN/status/907913534964506625
Thanks, Eurogamer.
