Playerunknown's Battlegrounds first-person-only mode now supports squads
No more cheeky peeky
If you'd rather play Playerunknown's Battlegrounds [official site] without folks using the third-person camera view to peek around corners and over walls, good news: the first-person-only option is now live for all modes. While regular Plunkbat lets people switch between third and first-person views with the press of a button, this mode locks everyone to peeping through their virtuapeepers. It makes for quite a different pace.
After a trial run in the Solo and Duo queues on North American and European servers, the mode is now available for Squads and on the Asia servers too. Get the lads together, hop in the bantmobile, and enjoy the first-person view of slamming a Red Bull before hitting the town for some mischief.
The option is still marked as "beta" but heck, the game's in early access - everything is a bit wonky.
"Players, first-person only servers are now available in ALL game modes on NA, EU and ASIA servers," tweeted the game's official tweetblaster this morning. "Leaderboards will be added later."
First-person-only still isn't live on the Oceania, Central and South America, and South East Asia servers.
It's an interesting addition. Even aside from the cheeky peeky potential of third-person, being locked to a first-person view makes me do a lot more to update my situational awareness. While simply running places, I'm constantly flicking glances and slowing to check behind me. Directional sound awareness becomes more important too. Holding Alt does still let players rotate the camera without altering their character's direction, though it's locked to a reasonable neck range.
In other Plunkbat news, this week's 'weekly' patch launched this morning too. Its relatively minor changes include fixing a few bugs (hooray for again seeing someone's location on the minimap while spectating), making motorbike engine and vehicle skid sounds quieter, and optimising performance for CPUs with six or more cores.
As for the next big feature on the early access roadmap, climbing and vaulting, that mmmight arrive in this month's big 'monthly' patch.
"That's going to take us perhaps another month to get it to a state where we're happy to release it," creator Brendan 'Plunk' Greene told CNET at the end of July. "It may take a little longer, as all things in development sometimes do."
Battlechums, have you first-personed much? Will you now? My regular squadpals haven't yet decided but I hope we'll give it a good try. I am excited for final circles in fields where my view is filled entirely with wheat.