When I spoke to PUBG's Brendan Greene a few weeks ago, he told me the promises he made at the beginning of the runaway hit's development regarding launch dates "came from naivety on [his] part". Bluehole has now stressed that the revised "Q4 2017" target is still on-track, but that weekly and monthly updates will be sidestepped in order to maintain a "high standard of quality."
By way of this Steam Community update post, Bluehole says that changes to the game's schedule aim to improve how it as a team works on the game and how it continues to set "realistic" expectations for players.
"Until the official release of the game, we will not have our scheduled weekly or monthly patches rolling out as often as before," reads the post. "We’ve found internally that being rushed to finish certain features, and having shorter QA test time between pushing updates caused more issues than it solved in regards to maintaining a high standard of quality. We want to put our best content out, and ensure that everything we do is making the game more enjoyable with every update."
Bluehole continues to say that while weekly patches may fall by the wayside from hereon, the developer will use the time to test for "significantly" longer periods. In turn it hopes to produce more polishes and accomplished updates.
The post adds: "Again, we would like to assure you all that we are still on-track to release our game as per our updated timeline, and we want to emphasize to you that we are not winding down the development, or complacent. We have a lot of work to do, and we want this game to be released with as many fun, rich, enjoyable features and mechanics as possible. Our team will continue to be hard at work, and we are always listening to your feedback."
