The last leg of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds ’s time in Early Access probably won’t generate as many headlines as its first six months did, thanks to incoming changes to the game’s existing patch schedule. But it sounds like those changes will make it much easier for Bluehole to deliver well-polished new features to PUBG in the handful of updates that remain before version 1.0.
August has been a big month for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds . The first day of the month brought a new monthly patch (which technically should’ve debuted in July) that finally introduced first-person servers to the popular arena shooter. There were also rumors (later proven false) that Tencent, the Chinese investment company behind Riot Games, bought a stake in Bluehole to go along with its recently-acquired shares of Frontier Developments. But the latest word on PUBG isn’t going to be nearly as exciting for its community, six million players (and counting) that have grown accustomed to weekly and monthly updates.
According to Bluehole, new patches will emerge a bit more slowly during the game’s remaining time in Early Access. The studio still expects to release the launch build of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds before the end of 2017, but says it needs to give itself more time to work on the rest of the features planned for launch. Weekly and monthly patches have forced them to deliver new content quickly; however, a slower schedule means Bluehole can spend more time testing new features (some of which are incredibly complex) before deploying them outside the test environment.
“Although we may not release a weekly patch, we will utilize the test servers for significantly longer periods of time and deploy patches and hotfixes when necessary,” Bluehole wrote. “This way, when we have a new feature that we’d like to roll-out it will be more thoroughly polished thanks to extensive community feedback. This will result in our live build being more exciting for everyone and drastically reduce the amount of unforeseen issues. We want to thoroughly and truthfully emphasize that this will have absolutely no bearing on how much content we deliver, or how much we work on the development of the game.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is currently available in Early Access. The game’s full release is expected later this year and an Xbox One port is slated for early 2018.
Be sure to check back with Player.One and follow Scott on Twitter for more PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds news in 2017 and however long Bluehole supports PUBG in the years ahead.
