Playerunknown's Battlegrounds slowing pace of patching
Less haste
As mega-hit Battle Royale 'em up Playerunknown's Battlegrounds [official site] has rolled on through early access, it has mostly kept to its plan to releasing one big content update every month (one was a week late) and smaller tweaky fixy patches every week. That is changing. Developers Bluehole Studio today announced that they're easing up on the patch pace a little, no longer sticking to that strict schedule, as they found it was making them rush and could cause problems. This is certainly true. One Plunkbat patch earlier this month brought terrible lag problems, which were quickly fixed but sure sucked. I'm okay with a little more caution.
"Today we are changing our patch and update schedule to improve how we work on the game, as well as set realistic expectations for players," Bluehole said in today's announcement. They explained:
"We've found internally that being rushed to finish certain features, and having shorter QA test time between pushing updates caused more issues than it solved in regards to maintaining a high standard of quality. We want to put our best content out, and ensure that everything we do is making the game more enjoyable with every update."
For those who want bleeding-edge Plunkbat, Bluehole say they plan to lean on the public test build more, putting patches up for testing for longer and fixing them as necessary.
Bluehole insist that the change to Plunkbat's patching schedule "will have absolutely no bearing on how much content we deliver, or how much we work on the development of the game," and that "we are still on-track to release our game as per our updated timeline."
I'm okay with this. While there are some bits of Plunkbat I want now now now -- mostly the climbing and vaulting -- I'd rather they be ready than rushed. After that recent lag mess, waiting sounds fine. Plunkbat's journey through early access has gone more smoothly than many games, and I'd rather it continue being playable.
Oh, speaking of climbing and vaulting, one of Plunkbat's programmers recently shared a video giving a newer look. He stressed that it's work-in-progress with placeholder animations, and noted "Vault speed depends on character velocity, added ability to cancel before apex, added forcing vault over climb (if possible), improved geometry detection." Observe:
Heck yes.