Still in Steam Early Access, global sensation Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is pushing out a fairly sizeable update for September that has now been detailed in full. The headline new stuff is a new foggy weather mode, a new gun and there's a new town added to the Erangel map.
But there are also a ton of other, smaller changes, including a slew of optimizations to make the game run better on a range of different spec PCs.
The update is set to push out later this week, but folks who can't wait that long can play it on the test servers right now. Just open up your Steam library and make sure you've installed the test server client which you'll find directly below the main game in your games list.
Fog adds a whole new dimension to the gameplay, slashing the visibility across the landscape, particularly in FPP mode. On the test servers, the foggy weather is currently heavily weighted to appear so it can be given as much time as possible before pushing out to everyone. In the regular game, this won't be the case though, with a low probability of appearing.
The latest weapon to make its way into PUBG is the Mini-14.
Added a new weapon, the Mini-14. The Mini-14 is a lightweight and compact 5.56 semi-automatic marksman rifle. The weapon uses sniper rifle attachments for both the muzzle and magazine slots, and can take any type of optic sight.This weapon has lower damage stats than other DMR's, which is compensated by very high muzzle velocity and low bullet drop.
Another big addition, especially for the competitive scene, is leaderboards for the FPP game mode. Let the grind to number one commence!
Away from the actual gameplay, Bluehole has made a number of optimizations to the environment with the aim of making the game run smoother. It's no secret that even on high-end gaming PCs, PUBG isn't exactly a benchmark for performance right now. Shadows and buildings have both had work done on them, with buildings in particular targeted at making things more playable on lower-end PCs.
Oh, and there's a new town added to the map, East of Stalber. Loot hard.
In addition to what we're getting now, Bluehole has confirmed some additional details on a much awaited in-game ability: Vaulting. Long story short, it'll probably be here in November.
There are tens of thousands of objects that should be vaultable or climbable in Erangel. To perform the action, the geometry and properties of each object have to be dynamically detected and analyzed. The algorithm is quite complex and requires rigorous testing and fine-tuning of the map. Testing it for only a couple of days before deployment on the Live servers won't be enough for us to identify all bugs and side effects. Therefore, we are planning to test it for a longer period of time in early November.
There are so many little bits and pieces inside this update that we'd be here all day talking about them all. Hit the full patch notes to see every little detail. Test servers are now live and will be up for "at least two days" prior to any push to the release client. So if you like your PUBG on the bleeding edge, drop in and grab some dinner.
