PUBG is adding respawns, footballs in the lobbies, and a gun you can't reload
2021 is going to be a wild ride for the battle royale game
I never got into PUBG. I didn’t enjoy putting all that time and effort into the game only to die once and be returned to the main menu. That’s why I spend my battle royale funtimes in Warzone, where I can at least punch my way back into the game. But in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds’s 2021 roadmap, they’ve announced a new map that will allow players to respawn. Depending on the turnaround time, I might just have to get back into Plunkbat.
According to the dev plan world update on Steam, this will exclusively happen on a new 8x8 map:
"Tiger will utilize all the aspects of the Battlegrounds that you’ve known over the years but with one key change; the ability to return to the battle after an initial defeat. This is a feature we’ve seen become fairly common in the battle royale genre and is something we’ve been asked about quite a bit, especially when it comes to duos and squads. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see we’ve experimented a bit recently with what respawning on a Battleground looks like and Tiger is a big reason why.”
Tiger looks like it will be a bit of a testbed, with PUBG Corp saying it will play host to a number of innovations never before seen in the game, though there are no specifics. Are there tigers in PUBG? I say again, I currently don’t play it, but if they add tigers then I’ll reinstall it immediately in preparation for the future update.
Another new map, Kiki, was also announced. Kiki has a wide range of locations: underground labs, skyscrapers, swamps, and submerged buildings.
Though the far-flung future of a tiger-infested necromantic PUBG is one we can all get behind, there’s been a more immediate update. The Miramar map has had a major graphical update, with better textures, and an atmospheric update that makes it feel like the dry, dusty land it is. The trees are much nicer, I have to say. The map's overall polish has included reducing some of the clutter to help players zip across it. They’ve also added a Miramar-specific quad bike to the game, and an anti-vehicle sniper rifle that can’t be reloaded. Perhaps most excitingly, they're adding a football to the lobby.
Those changes are now live on the game’s test server, preparing for season 12's release on June 2nd. When the tigers are being added is anybody's guess.