I turned PUBG into a racing game, and now it’s fun again

The thing about live service games being a hangout space is this: when we socialize in real life, we don’t always end up doing the exact same thing. Some games are great at mirroring the improvisational aspect of how we spend time socially. 

Battle royales like PUBG aren’t among them. They’re necessarily prescriptive, and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be any fun. If you’re not in a certain part of the map, you die. If you don’t pay attention to other players, you die. If you fail to pick up the drippiest of loot items, it’s a slightly more convoluted route to death but nevertheless, death is the inevitable conclusion. 

So after six years of using PUBG as a hangout space with my mates, I’d grown a bit bored with all its damn rules. That’s why I invented Gumball Rally Mode, the greatest thing to happen to PUBG since it hit early access. You should try it. 

The background 

I’m not the best player in my regular PUBG group. Never have been, but that didn’t used to matter so much in the early years. Lately a couple of my mates have been taking it more seriously though, which means fewer stupid adventures and a lot more peeking out from behind trees. 

So I suggested we spend a casual match playing in a different way. Why don’t we stock up on gasoline, find a couple of motorgliders and see if we can spend a whole round airborne? Well, we did, and we couldn’t. But hey, It was an hour.

Then it came to me: a race. A race around Erangel.    

The objective 

To complete one lap of the map, using the outermost roads, before other players or zone damage kill you. First one to arrive back at the start/finish line wins. 

To do this, you need to create a custom game and ensure all participants are on different teams. You can play around with blue zone timings and damage values too if you like, because the default blue zone behaviour makes completing a lap of most maps extremely difficult. But therein lies the challenge. 

The rules

It’s really simple. 

All ground vehicles are permitted. Motorgliders are too, but only if you fancy taxiing one around the entire map at ground level. None of us have tried that yet. 

You have 60 seconds from the drop to secure a vehicle. There’s a neutralized period when everyone assembles at the start/finish line, the Zharki crossroads in the northwest corner of Erangel. 

Then you have exactly three minutes of loot time. Although you won’t be doing any shooting, collecting meds and stims is actually of crucial importance later in the race, because zone damage is going to absolutely leather you. You’re free to loot for meds at any points after the race starts too, of course, but you’re going to be losing ground to anyone who’s still in a vehicle, bombing down the road. 

After this neutralized three-minute looting phase is concluded, everyone assembles back in their vehicles, and upon the fourth synchronized sync of your horns, it’s race conditions.

Are you allowed to ram each other off the road? Shoot out each others’ tires? We haven’t definitively decided. An unspoken sporting conduct currently prevails, whereby drivers are allowed to edge each other wide and make light contact for comedy’s sake, but race-ruining collisions would be deeply frowned on. It’s early days yet for the sport, and it’s sure to evolve.

You are allowed to shoot out the tires of unoccupied roadside vehicles, though, to limit your competitors’ options when they’re in need of a car swap.

Cutting corners is not permitted, but since everyone’s on different teams and therefore can’t see each other on the minimap, it’s hard to police this if someone gets so far out in front that they’re out of view. A sense of sporting conduct is the only real enforcer.

The first attempt

I dropped right next to a Dacia with three-quarters of a tank of fuel, which is about as good as it gets. My opponents weren’t quite so lucky and scrambled for vehicles outside Zharki, appearing with just seconds left in a buggy, fueled very light, and a UAZ. 

Feeling cocky, I set to work on securing some medkits and energy drinks in the town itself but came up short. Not one health item, in three minutes of searching. The others were keeping quiet; a sure sign that they’d managed to secure an advantage that would come into effect later in the race. 

Nevertheless, we stepped back into our vehicles, slammed our horns in sync, and set off on the long journey south along Erangel’s, er, scenic west coast. 

The speed disparity between our vehicles was immediately apparent. My beautiful burgundy Dacia purred along at 120km/h, stretching out a healthy gap over the buggy within seconds. Meanwhile, the UAZ was inching along, hemorrhaging time to the rest. 

Holding the top speed advantage, I decided not to boost in order to save fuel and stay in the Dacia longer. The fewer car changes, the better. 

And that’s a sound strategy, but it doesn’t account for rolling your car on the 90-degree right-hander entering the Georgopol bridge. Fortunately, there was a motorbike just a short jog away from that bridge, but the time I lost to the others was significant. Also the motorbike’s top speed leaves much to be desired.

I don’t see the others for the rest of the race. We all quickly realize that whoever’s in first place also gets first pick of all the vehicles, extending their advantage. Being in last place, your vehicle options are equivalent to rifling through a secondary school’s lost property bin in order to cobble together a P.E. kit. 

Anyway, then the zone comes in and I die. Not quickly, not dramatically, nor with much dignity. Instead, the zones chip away at my health while I drive resolutely along a road in the opposite direction to safety, realizing too late that I need to get out and loot the nearest town for meds. When I finally die, I’m hunched over in a small detached house applying bandages. 

The other two die about three minutes later, two-thirds of the way through the lap.

The meta

That first attempt taught us a lot, and in the subsequent races, our tactics evolved quickly. 

We learned that electing not to boost in order to save fuel is basically pointless. It’s much quicker to guzzle petrol, maintain a higher top speed, and change cars when you start running on fumes. And since being in P1 offers such an advantage in terms of picking your next vehicle, you want to be boosting constantly to stay in the fight for position. 

A very clear hierarchy of desirable vehicles has been established, too. At the top of the tree is the Coupe RB, with a scorching 140ish km/h boosted top speed, lithe cornering, and a sporty look that would turn heads, if all the heads in question weren’t locked into desperately dangerous small arms fights. 

The Dacia is a close second. These tend to be fuelled heavier, for some reason. Buggies and motorbikes are next down the order, and UAZs - the stalwart of drive-by specialists - are only a viable option in an absolute emergency. 

We’ve all become quite skilled at pointing our cars straight forwards for long enough to apply a bandage, too. This is a core late-game skill, when the blue zone is absolutely destroying everyone. I’ve experimented with picking up fuel cans, but it turns out that doesn’t really save any time compared with changing vehicles. 

Let's make it a thing

You’re now armed with 100% of the information required to turn PUBG into a racing game, and to develop your own ruleset. Trying a lap on a ranked server? Doubling the bluezone damage, but increasing med loot frequency? It’s over to you. 

If you're looking to create your own weird and wonderful game modes with pals, our list of the best co-op games will help you on your way to finding the perfect environment for your next wacky scheme or ill-advised death race.