On Thursday evening, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (opens in new tab) launched its time-limited Desert Knights mode (opens in new tab), a 50-player deathmatch pitting ten five-person teams against each other in a small corner of Miramar. It was meant to run until the end of the weekend, but on Friday afternoon developer Bluehole had to pull the plug early because it was messing up the game's servers and stopping players from connecting to PUBG altogether.
PC Players: The emergency maintenance is now complete.Unfortunately, we've had to prematurely end this week's event mode, as it was found to be the cause of recent server instability. Our engineers are working hard to ensure this problem doesn't occur in the future.May 4, 2018
That's bad timing, to say the least. Players had less than 24 hours to try out the mode, and it didn't make it through to the weekend, which would have been peak playing time. I suppose the team had no choice but to pull it when they discovered that it was causing issues elsewhere, but that won't be much consolation to players that were eager to dive in.
PUBG's first deathmatch mode (opens in new tab), which ran last month, went a lot smoother, so here's hoping that the hiccup with Desert Knights was a one-off. My guess would be that Desert Knights will return soon, giving players that missed out another chance to play it.
