by KobashiPlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Gets Full Release Timeline
Continuing onits massive success, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds creative director Brendan Greene wants a full release within the next six months and shared planned features in an interview with GamesIndustry.
At the moment, Battlegrounds is still in Early Access. Interestingly, Greene was hesitant to enter Steam’s program. “When we first started development, I was unsure about Early Access because of all the stigma attached to it,” Greene stated. “But our producer decided that before we did Early Access, we’d make sure the game was stable and playable.”
Even after the Battle Royale title earned over $11 million within its first days and continued to rise over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, the creative director doesn’t want to lose momentum. Greene stated he’s determined to have a full launch within the next six months.
“People are like, ‘oh yeah, right’ because of all those other games that said that and are still in Early Access two, three years on,” he says. “But we’re really lucky; we’re working with Unreal.”
DayZ and H1Z1 work on their own proprietary engine – that is so much harder to work on, because Unreal has a lot of people just working on the engine whereas DayZ has maybe 10 or less. That gives us a huge advantage. We’re going to do this in six months because we have a team that are committed.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has many ideas in the works before they push a full release. Every month there are large content drops, with new weapons, vehicles, and big gameplay changes. In addition to the daily, weekly, and monthly updates, the Battlegrounds developers are working towards porting the game onto Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Lastly, Greene mentioned his development team is working on not only Observer Mode, but also delayed live-game spectator features, which could be used for Battlegrounds’ future esports.
“We’ll have 3D in-game replays eventually with a cinematic camera so you can go back and record your round,” he says. “That’s going to be helpful for any esports things we end up doing – especially if we could have a live game delayed by two or three minutes so spectators can see stuff.”
Capturing action in Battle Royale is quite tough because there’s so much going on, but I had four years to think about these tools that I want to build and now I get a chance to work with this team that trusts me and wants to do everything I want to do. I feel a little bit blessed, and I really can’t let the public down.
Even with the spectator cameras and Observer Mode, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may run into some issues like H1Z1 did with their Fight for the Crown event. There’s no timeline yet for the release of Spectator Mode or Observer Mode.
Battlegrounds’ seventh week will be the only break the developers had from their successful Early Access release. You can expect updates to the game every week, with larger patches every month as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds moves towards its full release.
