Jungle, not snow, as many hoped, will be the setting for the new PUBG map.
Revealing plans for 2018 in a blog post today, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds creative director Brendan Greene showed off the first-ever look at PUBG's third map. Here it is
As marked, this unnamed, 4x4 km tropical terrain is one-quarter the size of Miramar and Erangel, which are each 8x8 km, including aquatic zones. "It’s a much smaller map and should give you all a much more intense and faster paced Battle Royale experience. It will offer a higher player density and shorter matches and we want to get it into your hands early this time around so we can use your input to make it a great experience for everyone," writes Greene.
It's unclear whether the new map will also accommodate 100 players, but the mention of higher player density seems to indicate that the capacity won't change much, if at all. The new map will go live on PUBG's test server next month.
Based on the concept art, the new map will only have five or six zones with structures, including what looks like a hillside village that runs east-to-west in the northeast. This raises big questions about loot propagation on the map—it would be a big change for loot to spawn outside of structures, so perhaps smaller buildings aren't accounted for in this concept art.
The rest of the island appears dense with vegetation across three high-elevation peaks and into flatter areas closer to the coast, while terraced land lines the center. A murky river splits the mass into three smaller isles—what will we call them?
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is getting a new map next month, despite the fact dealing with cheaters has preoccupied PUBG Corp of late. To mark the beginning of its newest season, the last-person-standing 'em up is also in-line for two new cosmetic crates: The Fever crate, and the Militia crate.
From back to front, the Militia crate treats battle royalers to an 'Erangel resistance force' outfit and/or 'Miramar frontiersman' rig out—dropped randomly among the game's four existing crates free-of-charge.
The Fever crate, on the other hand, grants players an ensemble of neat '70s and '80s-inspired threads. They look like this:
Despite demand—seriously, who is willing to pay upwards of $450 for a cosmetic trench coat?—PUBG's outfits are otherwise pretty bland, so I'm all for adding a splash of disco-era clobber into the mix. Those outfits there can be purchased with BP and/or unlocked with Early Bird keys, so says the developer.
Both Fever and Militia crates go live on test servers today, and will be officially released tomorrow, February 22. Find out more this way.
Some PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds players are so bored by its desert map, Miramar, that they're deleting game files so that they automatically leave any round that randomly selects the map from the current pool of two. One user has even created a programme that changes the extensions of the Miramar files so that the game cannot load the map, booting you back out to the menu instead.
Perhaps developer Bluehole has noticed, because the latest update for the game aims to make Miramar more interesting. It adds more buildings and cover across the whole map to "improve the engagement experience" (and hopefully make it feel less empty), lays down more off-road routes so you can take vehicles cross country, and boosts the chances of better loot spawning in certain areas.
The update also introduces a new anti-cheat measure to the game's test servers. The developer is expecting it to cause crashes for some people, so they're giving it a trial run first before rolling it out to the servers proper in an attempt to combat the ever-increasing number of in-game hackers. Bluehole has thrown in a couple of bug fixes, too, which you can read about in the full patch notes.
I, for one, won't be deleting my Miramar files—I agree that the game's original map, Erangel, is more fun to play (partly because I know it better) but I enjoy having some variety. I'm sure there are people that want to play only Miramar, and that some of them will have deleted their Erangel game files. Bluehole has said it will add a proper map select option at some point, so let's hope that happens sooner rather than later. An official tool is surely preferable to this home-brewed workaround.
Destiny 2 left 2017 on quite the cliffhanger. Players were abandoning the game in droves, and those sticking around were overflowing with salt about the anaemic endgame and obnoxious use of microtransactions at the expense of actual content. Would Bungie be able to satisfactorily address the complaints and start turning things around? Or is it doomed to become one of those sequels that somehow managed to break what was good about the first game?
Today we finally got some detail regarding how the studio hopes to solve various issues, which were best summed up last year by game director Luke Smith when he admitted: “Destiny 2 is a game that doesn't have enough excuses, or reasons, to play for those hobbyist players.” The guy tasked with leading the recovery effort is Christopher Barrett, who heads the live team at Bungie. This afternoon he published a whopping Destiny 2 development update blog outlining the changes coming over the following weeks and months. There’s quite a bit to get into, but we've pulled out the most interesting stuff.
