Playerunknown's Battlegrounds extending Sanhok test, getting sniper War mode

Whether you fancy a tropical getaway this weekend or to skulk in a rainy field with a bunch of folks dressed as bushes, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has you covered. To start, the final public beta test of the battle royale shooter's third map, Sanhok, has been extended once again, this time until Monday. The tropical map been pretty wonky on the test servers, with players stuttering and jerking around particularly at the start of rounds, so developers PUBG Corp want to test it more. As for wet fields, the team deathmatch event mode War is returning tonight, this time arming everyone with sniper rifles and ghillie suits on rainy Erangel.

The Sanhok test, the final one before the map is due to launch towards the end of the month, was originally supposed to end this Monday but was extended until today. Now it's extended again, this time running until noon on Monday, June 11th (that's 4am Pacific).

PUBG Corp are keen to test a potential fix for the lag Sanhok suffers in early rounds, which can make spicy drops in particular quite annoying as you jerk around and fail to pick up guns. They say that the problem is down to servers sending "unnecessary" data to players, overloading them. Here comes the science bit - concentrate!

"Currently, the distance in which players are rendered is up to a maximum radius of 1km from your current position. As Sanhok is 1/4th the size of Erangel and Miramar, the number of players within this 1km area is generally much higher.

"Some performance issues have arisen due to this, with the direct result being a reduced server frame speed, which leads to early-game server performance issues, including player teleporting or stuttering. According to our internal data, the kill rate at extremely long distances is very low and therefore we've decided to reduce the maximum player render distance specifically on Sanhok, which will increase performance."

Once they've made that change in a patch, they want to see if it actually works, and so testing will continue to Monday.

I've enjoyed Sanhok, despite the wonk, so I hope they can resolve this and bring it to the game's natural (but certainly non-zero) level of wonk. For a few tips to help get you started, check out our Sanhok guide.

If you want something still special but more stable, this weekend's War Mode event might be interest you. 'One Shot, One Kill' will offer 10v10v10 team deathmatch on a small and rainy section of Erangel (oh, how I've missed the rain!).

All players will spawn with a Kar98k sniper rifle, a 4x scope, a ghillie suit, and a handgun, which will fill the land with dryad and ent cosplayers trying to murder each other unseen. The event will also disable knockdowns, meaning if you get shot and go down, you're straight to dead and into the respawn queue.

No red zone, no crate drops, no loot. And as ever, the War rounds will last 15 minutes at most.

The new War event is starting overnight, at 6am on Friday for us here in the UK (but 10pm on Thursday for our Pacific friends). It'll then run until 6am on Monday the 11th (10pm Sunday Pacific).

Though if you want a really exotic battle royale experience this weekend, Totally Accurate Battlegrounds is still free right now.