The end of war should be a cause for celebration, but there was only frustration when Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds ended its latest War Mode event after less than a day due to the servers crashing all over. A fortnight later, it’s fixed and back, raining heavily-armed players over tiny slices of Miramar for 5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5v5 team deathmatch with respawning. The event will end on Sunday night, mind, so you’ve only got two-and-a-half days to lock and load.
The stag & hen weekend banter of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds will enter fruity new heights tonight when the new 4x4km Southeast Asian map, now named Sanhok, enters public testing. Having previously required a key, it’ll launch in the new Experimental Client overnight (at 3am UK time on Friday; 7pm Pacific on Thursday), a little more polished than before – and with the new ability to pelt each other with apples while in the lobby. Scrumping? Foodfights? Classic banter. Oi OIII heads up you wankers. Read the rest of this entry »
The wee new map coming to Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, previously known as Codename: Savage, still needs a few months of work but it’s done enough to get a wider testing audience and finally receive a name. Sanhok is the name, developers PUBG Corp have announced, a portmanteau of the Thai word for fun and the Filipino word for chicken. Sanhok is a place inspired by islands around southeast Asia, see. Sanhok will launch another period of beta testing this week and this time it won’t require players to sign up for a key, letting everyone who owns the game have a play. Read the rest of this entry »
The folks of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds have made one of the most significant adjustments to how the game is played, via the Weapons Balance Update (Patch 12), which re-balanced everything from damage to scope reticle to movement speeds while certain weapons are equipped. It’s such an intricate and deep re-alignment of the entire game that Plunkbat players are encouraged to take part in a new survey in order to make sure PUBG Corporation haven’t, you know, completely ruined the game. In exchange, there is a lottery system for survey participant rewards.
Also, if you’re still not on board with Plunkbat, please read about Plunkbat’s creator agreeing with you. You’re wrong, though, and so is he.
I was just about to tell you how I’m looking forward to War mode, the (sorta) new event for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Then I got caught off guard by just how edgy and ridiculous it sounds to get excited about something with a double-barrelled reference to conflict in its name. It’s a travesty that there’s nothing else we could call it.
Warm Plunkbat is the imminent and temporary return of the team deathmatch mode from last month, which breaks from PUBG’s traditional ‘once you’re gone you’re gone’ structure and lets you respawn. This time round though, it’s played with ten teams of five and everyone starts with top-tier loot. I wasn’t around for the last one, so I’m intrigued to see how Plunkbat plays when most of the tension of dying gets cut away. It kicks off at 3am, so if anyone’s mega keen you’ll only need to stay up for a few more hours.
The Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds servers will go down for maintenance tonight then return with a map selection option, a boss new muscle car, a big weapon rebalancing, a new rifle, loads of extra scopes and grips and bits, and other shiny newness. This is all in Update 12, the rad big patch which has been in testing for a week, see. What I’ve played on the test server has really excited me, so grand, let’s go. Meet you outside El Pozo for muscle car races. Read the rest of this entry »
Not too long ago, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds was a scruffy little also-ran in Early Access, barely evolved past its Day Z mod roots. Now, it’s multi-billion dollar business worldwide, especially in growing eastern markets. Big money protects itself, for better or worse, and a recent crackdown on the creators of popular cheat tools for Plunkbat has resulted in the arrest of 15 individuals in China, according to this developer update on Steam, along with reaffirmations that the anti-cheat software in-game would be improved.
The long-awaited map select option, a muscle car with fluffy dice hanging from the mirror, a new marksman rifle, new weapon attachments, and a big weapon rebalance will drop into Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds in the next update. After weeks of minor updates, this sounds a good’un – or at least an interesting one. The rebalance aims to even out assault rifles so none is a clear “best”, power up submachineguns, increase the damage and range of shotguns, and generally make more weapons viable. The patch is on the test servers today and I’m certainly keen to check all this out. Read the rest of this entry »
Plunkbat (Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds for short) may have taken over the world already, but it’s not quite made the inroads into esports that you’d expect, leaving the likes of Overwatch and Counter-Strike to fill the vacuum. Well, as we all know, there’s only one solution to a lack of esports representation: Fat sacks of cash-money, and PUBG Corp. are providing as 20 teams congregate in Berlin this July to fight for a $2m (USD) prize pot.
And, presumably, a very expensive chicken dinner.
The long-promised option to choose which map you play on in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is “almost complete”, developers PUBG Corp said today, though we will need to wait a little longer. If you fancy skipping one map or playing a particular one, you’ll have that option. The devs had expressed concerns that adding map select might increase matchmaking times an unpleasant amount but, after analysing data from tens of millions of matches, seem confident that it shouldn’t cause problems. They shared a look at the work-in-progress option and yup, it looks simple enough. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Update Night
Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.
“Golf is a good walk spoiled,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said. If he was writing about videogames in 2018 (and not, you know, dead for the last century), I think old Twainy boy would have said the same about PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Read the rest of this entry »
Codename: Savage, the new 4x4km map in development for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, today is back in closed beta testing after handing out more keys over the weekend. Savage returns with several new areas, dynamic weather that continues to change throughout the round, and some interesting changes to the safe zone. Developers PUBG Corp say that Savage’s blue ring of death can now “calculate and adjust its waiting time based on the number of players left alive,” which I’d be interested to see them try on the regular maps too.
Back on the main client, the game this week will add a flight path map marker as well as new weapon skins – including for its iconic pan. Read the rest of this entry »
Grab nine of your closest murderpals because the latest Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds event mode is going big. War, as it’s named, is a 10v10v10 team deathmatch mode going down in static small circles. Players rain down from the skies already equipped with random gear, then battle to be the first team to hit the frag limit. And yup, this mode does have respawning. War may be good for absolutely nothing, but War mode looks a lark.
In other news, the new small map, Codename: Savage, is returning to closed testing next week. More beta keys will be available from Saturday. Read the rest of this entry »
Another day, another patch for Plunkbat, that semi-popular game colloquially known as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds to some people called Brendan. It’s a game-changer today, making the murder-fields tragically less fashionable, but slightly more functional. From this day forth, no longer will random, extraneous items of clothing be spawned in the middle of otherwise-useful piles of weaponry. End of an era, I know.
Now that every last Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds player has settled on using the nickname ‘Plunkbat’, what does creator Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene think?
“No,” he told Shacknews over the weekend as they discussed nicknames then teamed up to shame us all. “I don’t get that. Like, really. It’s people trying to be edgy, and it’s like I’m not a fourteen-year-old kid, you know what I mean? It’s like ‘Oh ho it’s so edgy ahh’.”
Greene, whose signature in-game outfit includes a hooded leather coat and five studded leather legstraps, has it backwards: Plunkbat is a goofball name opposing the game’s own edgy wrapping, a celebration of how silly this 100-player murderfest is. It’s contrary, absolutely, but the opposite of edgy. Read the rest of this entry »
The makers of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds are suing a mobile game developer for copyright infringement, targeting two games with a plane load of similarities. Rules of Survival and Knives Out were both released in November last year by Chinese developer NetEase and contain features that the Plunkbatters claim “constitute copyrightable subject matter”. PUBG Corp list several of these features in their lawsuit, including the shrinking play area, a frying pan, and the playground phrase “winner winner, chicken dinner”. Read the rest of this entry »
A new event mode starts in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds tonight, and it focuses on something close to my heart. For three days, the Tequila Sunrise squad mode will arm everyone with only shotguns and melee weapons for a showdown on Miramar starting with a smaller safe zone. I’m delighted. I’m a sucker for the tension and risk/reward of weapons which fire slowly but can spit wild damage, and often found clinging to my over-and-under shotgun for as long as possible. Let’s do this.
In other Plunknews, a team deathmatch mode with respawning, named War, has popped up unannounced in its Custom Match options. Those rounds are fiddly to get into but hey, it’s there now if you really want it. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the great comforts in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is knowing that the squad which killed you and the lads absolutely, definitely, 100% went on to win the game – who else could defeat you? This week, the battle royale FPS will start letting players verify this by watching the rest of the round through their killer’s eyes. Then through the eyes of their killer’s killer if they die too. And so on. It’s murder all the way down.
Developers PUBG Corp have also started testing the new 4x4km map in a closed beta. The initial test quickly ran out of keys but more are planned for the coming weeks, and for now we outsiders can watch others playing it. Read the rest of this entry »
In the ongoing war against lag in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, the developers are considering a soft form of region lock to stop distant players lagging up other regions’ servers. Should the plan go ahead, Plunkers won’t be able to see and play on a server outside their region unless they’re in a squad together with someone who is in its region. This still just a potential change at this point, not decided, and still a way away.
A lot sooner, weapon skins are coming to Plunkbat. The next update will add them in two new crates, one of which requires a paid key to open. They are mostly ugly. Read the rest of this entry »
The very surface of the games industry as we know it is still a free-flowing mass of magma, all recognizably solid ground reduced to dust by the shocking impact of the hyper-popular Battle Royale shooter genre, accelerated to planet-smashing speeds by the rise of high-end PC gaming in China.
With the very future of the industry still unsure (well, more unsure than usual), it’s almost hard to believe that this cataclysmic event happened just a year ago. In a video released alongside their GDC appearance, the lead developers of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds shared their thoughts on the past twelve months, plus a little glimpse at the upcoming island map.
