Playerunknown's Battleground update 12 bringing map select, weapon rebalancing, muscle car with fluffy dice

The long-awaited map select option, a muscle car with fluffy dice hanging from the mirror, a new marksman rifle, new weapon attachments, and a big weapon rebalance will drop into Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in the next update. After weeks of minor updates, this sounds a good'un - or at least an interesting one. The rebalance aims to even out assault rifles so none is a clear "best", power up submachineguns, increase the damage and range of shotguns, and generally make more weapons viable. The patch is on the test servers today and I'm certainly keen to check all this out.

"According to our research, only a few specific types of weapons (ARs) are used in most situations," developers PUBG Corp. said last week when first announcing the rebalance. "We believe the choice about which gun to use should be based on personal preference and its effectiveness in any given situation, rather than simply 'which gun is strongest.' Our goal is to make it so no one gun will feel objectively better than the others."

Now that the changes are confirmed, dang, wow, they're fiddling with a lot.

Increasing locational damage multipliers on many weapons, reducing recoil and sway on SMGs while increasing it for almost all ARs, increasing AR reload times, increasing recoil on all marksman rifles, making movement speed slower when holding snipers or LMGs or shotguns, increasing grenade damage while removing the knockback, letting DMRs use AR attachments as well as SR ones, adding three new grips, giving the shotgun a new attachment to make spread shorter but wider, adding 3x and 6x scopes... many gun changes. Dang.

One thread across many changes seems to be increasing the effective range of close-quarters weapons while making assault and marksman rifles trickier at long ranges. Huddle in closer, everyone. That woud seem to dovetail with Miramar changes adding more trees and rocks across the big open map and more small buildings on the outskirts of cities and towns. I'll need to see how all this shakes out in-game, mind.

The new weapon is the SLR, a 7.62mm DMR with a 10-round magazine, which can be found as a random spawn on the ground. "The SLR is more powerful than the SKS but has more recoil," PUBG Corp say. "Recoil control is the key to using the SLR effectively."

And the new vehicle, oh baby, I hereby dub it the Bantmobile. It's a four-seater muscle car, found only on Miramar. It's not great off-road but PURRS along highways. I adore it. It comes in some great colours, with the soft top up or down, and its fluffy dice bounce as you drive.

All that AND map selection is finally in, letting players pick which map(s) they play on or just letting the game decide as before.

And red dot, holo, and 2x sights now have a variety of reticle styles and colour.

And players can only be underwater for shorter times, taking more damage when drowning and longer to recover their breath on the surface. The devs say they want "to reduce the effectiveness of hiding underwater."

And "We reduced some overly-dramatic collision effects (read: space shuttle takeoffs) that occurred when the motorbike crashed into other vehicles."

Anyway. There's more. See the Update #12 patch notes for more details on everything. I'm tentatively very excited?

The patch is now on the test server, though the devs say the scope and importance of weapon rebalancing means "we're going to keep the changes on the test server for longer than we normally would." So no firm word on when this will hit the live servers.