PUBG's 50-player deathmatch mode is back after Bluehole fixes server troubles

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Desert Knights mode, a 50-player deathmatch between ten teams of five players, lasted less than 24 hours when it launched two weeks ago. It was meant to run for three days, but developer Bluehole pulled the plug early because it was messing up the game's servers. After ironing out those issues, the mode is back, and it'll run until the end of this weekend.

Desert Knights, the latest of PUBG's deathmatch-like War modes, takes place in a small blue zone on Miramar that never changes size. If you die, you'll respawn from one of the planes that fly overhead every 40 seconds.

Everyone gets the best kit in the game, including a level three vest, a level three helmet, and one of the weapons that you can only normally find in a care package. To win, a team must reach 200 points. You get three points for a kill and one point for knocking an enemy down, but lose five for knocking or killing your own teammates. Revives take just two seconds, so it's not hard to pick up a downed ally.

I briefly played the first War mode, which had 30 players instead of 50, and had a good time without falling in love with it. Let's hope that the servers can take the strain this time: browsing Twitter and Reddit, it doesn't seem that players are having any issues, so it's looking good for now.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.