Playerunknown's Battlegrounds blue zone of death is now even deathlier

It's easy to forget that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is in early access, given its current position as industry-baffling overlord ascendant of all things multiplayer and shooty, but we're still some ways off from its official release. In a Steam community update on Saturday, developers PUBG Corp outlined their plans for the game between now and its version 1.0 launch, as well as detailing some tweaks in the latest patch.

The good news: Armour is now more consistent, where previously it would fail to stop bullets from time to time due to bugs.

The bad news: The all-consuming blue zone of death does not care about your pathetic human armour, bug-ridden or otherwise, and is now even more damaging than before.

PUBG Corp's reasoning is that players were spending too much time outside of the combat area, soaking up blue zone damage with carefully timed healing. While I can see their point, I can't help but think that (at least in the earlier phases of a match) there should be more opportunities for players to snag themselves a vehicle and catch up with the pack. I've not played Plunkbat as much as I would have liked, but about a quarter of my matches have ended with me trying desperately to outrun inevitability while others cruise past in their magnificent motorised machines.

Beyond that, their longer-term plans amount to a basic roadmap to version 1.0. They plan on running at least three builds on test servers (separate from the current public build), the first of which will be focused on the new vaulting and climbing features. Once locked-down and ready for public consumption, they plan on focusing another two test-updates on optimisation as well as general bug-hunting.

Once happy that these milestones have been passed on the test servers, the combined update will be beamed to the general public, marking PUBG's official move to version 1.0 and an end to its time in early access. If all goes to plan, they hope to be there by early November. Not that the changed in version number means much; development will still continue as usual, with a second, desert-themed environment planned for release not too long after 'launch' - something they had previously had in their launch roadmap, but conspicuously absent now.