PUBG will test a deadlier blue zone next week

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Developer hopes it will encourage more focused firefights.

One of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' defining features is its ever-tightening play area. Anyone caught outside of that area is said to be in the blue zone, and gradually takes damage over time. Well, the development team plans to ramp up the damage that the blue zone deals to try and get players to focus on combat inside the play area, it announced yesterday.

The change will first arrive in the test servers early next week, the team said in a Steam post. "From this new update, you will be able to focus more on the immediate, close-ranged skirmishes inside the play zone, instead of dealing with enemies outside of the play zone during the mid to late phases of the game. We would love to hear the responses regarding the changes from all members of our community once you’ve tried it in the test servers."

Personally, I think it's a good idea, and could encourage a quicker pace as players rush to get safe. Let's see how it goes, though.

In other news, new vaulting and climbing mechanics—which Christopher tried out last week—will arrive on the game's test servers in early November. The game is on track to release before the end of the year, but any updates being tested before then (including vaulting and blue zone damage) won't be rolled out to the live servers until full release. "It is not always easy to merge the changes to our live build, because our development build and live build are separate," the team said.

"Therefore, we have decided to merge improvements, bug fixes, and other features, all at once to the test servers, which will then be implemented cumulatively for the 1.0 release."

Developer Bluehole will have to address the issue of hacking, too, which remains a problem, particularly towards the top of the leaderboards (a place that I can only dream about). The official account for the game's anti-cheat service said yesterday that it had banned 25,000 players in the preceding 24 hours.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

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.