PUBG Corp. the subsidiary of Bluehole that now houses all things PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (opens in new tab) (PUBG), shared some details of the team's plan for 2017 and 2018 with the community. In short, gold PC release and launching on Xbox One are both still on target by the end of this year. There's still much work to be done on the game itself, including further bug squashing and optimizations. For the time being, however, it's all about vaults and climbing.
If you've somehow been absent from the online world, the developer of PUBG plans to add new vaulting and climbing mechanics, new vehicles, a new desert map and instant replay. It's stated that work has been done on further improving the stability of the game overall, though it's still a pain to run even on more advanced systems. Interestingly, the developer will roll out just one more patch to work on getting the game in better shape for gold release.
For PC, we will be only focusing on doing our best to stabilize the launch build and we don't have any plans to deploy patches to live servers except for this week. However, there will be features like vaulting and climbing which will have a huge impact on the game and need to be tested for at least a month. We will be running test servers at least three times in preparation for that. Through these test servers, we would like to conduct large scale tests for the content and features that are not in the live build and create a foundation for a very stable official launch.
Here's how PUBG Corp. will carry out the testing:
- 1st phase: Testing vaulting & climbing.
- 2nd phase: Other new content and features.
- 3rd phase: Continued testing (including desert map).
Content and features on test servers will be thoroughly tested for around two to four weeks. As such, patches rolled out to the live servers will come to an end as the team focuses on getting everything stable by the time they expect to go live on both platforms. An update as to when vaulting and climbing will be available for testing will be shared in late October or early November — a full schedule will be released soon.
What to expect from PUBG on Xbox One
The new season will commence on October 20 as the developer makes further improvements to the leaderboard optimization. And first-person squads will be added this week after the leaderboard system has been updated. This last patch before 1.0 release will contain the following:
Gameplay
- Decreased the Starting Island item spawn levels in order to adjust the item balance on the Northeast side of Erangel.
Bug Fixes
- Eliminated the fire animation and effect that occured in the Starting Airplane when a player was on fire from a molotov cocktail.
- Fixed a bug that enabled a character to hold a main weapon and frying pan simultaneously.
- Fixed a spectator mode bug of flickering weapon UI icons.
No concrete release dates were supplied for PC and Xbox Game Preview, though we imagine we'll hear more nearer to the new year.
Rich Edmonds is Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him over on Twitter at @RichEdmonds.
