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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Update: the lag should now be fixed. Huzzah!

If you’ve tried to play Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] since yesterday’s big update, you’ve likely noticed that the early access Battle Royale ’em up has gotten itself into a bit of a state. It’s suffered from sound stuttering and glitching out, low FPS, and problems with reconnecting, among others. Bluehole Studio have been hastily patching but one big problem still remains: server lag which has claimed many lives and made others pretty unpleasant. Not every round gets ruined but the problem is common enough that I’ve stopped playing Plunkbat until this is fixed. Bluehole say they’re working on it. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest big ‘monthly’ update to early access Battle Royale ’em up Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] may have been delayed to this Thursday but the wait will be worth it: the patch will finally add Plunkbat’s Blue Hi-top Trainers to the pool of permanent unlockable clothing. In this hell of xtreme ’90s fashion, at least we’ll have good shoes every round. Oh, and the update will also add first-person-only servers, and a field of view slider, and performance optimisations, and Brendan ‘Playerunknown’ Greene has apologised for how poorly they handled announcing this update’s paid cosmetic crate, but the important point is: unlockable Blue Hi-tops. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m only posting news about Playerunkown’s Battlegrounds [official site] because our resident PlunkBatters – Alice, Graham and Adam – are nowhere to be found. Perhaps they are playing right now? All of them, unwisely traipsing together across an open field together. Suddenly, BAM. Graham is down – a shot to the ribcage. Alice hits the dirt, shouting directions. Adam tries to run to the nearest shrub, but is ambushed by a man hiding in an overturned jeep. BAM. A rifle round in the belly. Alice, friendless and surrounded, weighs her options and reloads her machine gun with a fresh magazine. It’s time to take out the tra–

BAM.

She never saw the man who killed her. A single 9mm bullet to the back of the skull. He looms over her corpse. It’s Brendan Greene, the Playerunknown himself. He takes a drag of an almost-finished cigarette. “We will be resetting the leaderboards,” he says, flicking the spent cig onto Alice’s cadaver, “on the first of each month in order to test new ranking algorithms and ELO changes.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Battle Royale ’em up Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is to get explictly Battle Royale-y with new outfits based on the movie which launched a thousand early access ships. Most of these will only be available in a special crate which will only be available for a limited time and, to raise money for a Plunkbat tournament, will cost $2.50 to open.

Unfortunately, the big ‘monthly’ update expected this Thursday has delayed back to next week, held up by a now-smashed bug. It will, when it gets here, add the promised first-person-only servers. Read the rest of this entry »

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] will soon start rolling out a mode locking all players to the first-person view, coming with this month’s big ‘Monthly’ update. The splendid 100-man rumble lets players switch between first-person and third-person cameras with the press of a button, see, and some dislike how the third-person view lets players peek around corners and into places they couldn’t otherwise see. For those folks who fancy a stricter challenge, the new servers will block that. It’ll initially be available in Plunkbat’s Solo and Duo modes, rolling out to full Squad mode later. Read the rest of this entry »

Cor blimey, love a duck, stone the crows, decide to be ‘just good friends’ with a ptarmigan, and subtweet an owl: another early access game has been delayed. The splendid Battle Royale ’em up Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] was due to launch in full within six months of hitting early access — by around the end of September 2017 — but creator Brendan ‘Playerunknown’ Greene now says it’ll launch some time from October to the end of the year. The delay is because Bluehole Studio would rather not rush Plunkbat out, obvs, and instead launch when it’s ready. Read the rest of this entry »

The creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] has shown off corners of a desert map coming to the early access Battle Royale ’em up with a future update. Yeah yeah it looks a bit like Fallout: New Vegas’s nuclear wasteland but the real point is: a bicycle is visible in one screenshot. Is this a cheeky tease of rideable bicycles coming? We can only hope. Will the bicycle have a ringable bell? We can only dream! Read the rest of this entry »

With PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] heading to Xbox One later this year, developer Bluehole has been thinking about how it can bring players from both platforms together. Cross-platform play definitely looks like it’s on the cards, but there are still obstacles when it comes to competitive play.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve already told you that merciless murder-them-up PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds [official site] is getting an update this week, with a couple of new guns and heavily adjusted loot drop rate. But we didn’t tell you all the details, because we like to be mysterious. But also because the full list of patch notes hadn’t been released. It has now, so here’s all the teeny tiny details that may or may not result in your sudden, bloody death.
Read the rest of this entry »

Loot drop changes are coming to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site], the incredibly popular battle royale romp, in response to a bug that spawned items either more or less than was intended.

Read the rest of this entry »

The incredible rise of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] continues. The early access Battle Royale ’em up has surpassed 4 million copies sold, developers Bluehole Studio announced yesterday, which is… er… a lot. The game hasn’t even come out yet and it’s sold more copies than Zelda: Breath of the Wild (that’s at 3 million, and Link had a 20-day head-start). Pretty staggering.

Bluehole also boast that the game has hit $100m of revenue, 230,000 peak concurrent users on Steam, and 350,000 simultaneous viewers on Twitch. In case you didn’t realise, these are BIG NUMBERS.

Read the rest of this entry »

The splendid Battle Royale ’em up PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] is to get a whole lot more agile with the addition of climbing and vaulting, creator Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene has revealed at E3. I am mighty excited about the prospect of leaping over fences, climbing up walls, rolling over cars, and diving through windows, as this clunkiness of obstacles has been a minor concern for me and I wasn’t sure quite what the plan was. Turns out, the answer is swish movement that should make gunfights more exciting. Have a look in this trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday is patch day in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds [official site] and voila, this week’s early access update is out right now. This is one of the smaller weekly patches, as opposed to the larger monthly patches which add new features, but its fixes and tweaks are still welcome. We’re getting minor improvements to server performance, minor client performance improvements in specific circumstances, and a few fixes. They’re nothing major but this is only one of the weekly patches. Read the rest of this entry »