If you haven’t seen from the all encompassing media circus that follows smash hit PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, a date has been announced for the Xbox release: December 12th 2017. Not only that but the PC title is apparently going to be moving to their 1.0 release in December also, which might cause a few eyebrows to raise for anyone who’s been active over the last few weeks.
Coming to the Xbox Game Preview program, Battlegrounds will be available as early access – and probably slightly more broken than it’s PC counterpart. It’s being developed by a completely different studio and will follow a different update schedule so don’t expect immediate feature parity with it’s PC counterpart.
This announcement comes with the slightly disappointing move to offer limited time purchasable outfits for the Xbox One version. PUBG will not offer in game purchases while part of the preview program but I think it’s clear from the wording of their announcement that they will likely be included in the final release. Hopefully the lack of item trading on the Xbox infrastructure will prevent the sort of hacking epidemic the PC version is currently experiencing, where success in game can literally be profitable. Most of these hackers are likely motivated to score big and purchase loot boxes in game; the rarer items can be quite valuable on the Steam ecosystem.
Bluehole don’t seem to have figured out a permanent solution to the rampant hacking but have suggested that they’re banning upwards of thousands of accounts each day. It’s difficult to imagine them messing with their lootbox system in any way now. Partly because any change to the value of preexisting items might cause an uproar with players already invested but also because they’re making a bucketload of money from them.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what they have in mind for 1.0 but if they release when players are still reporting seeing hackers in almost every game? Well, PlayerUnknown might well wish he’d stayed unknown all along.
Sorry. It was too tempting a pun.