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PlayerUnknown of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds fame has said that despite their initial intentions to leave Early Access within six months of initial release, that just isn't going to happen. Instead, he said that he hopes to have the game ready for a full launch by the end of the year.Players,
Today I want to update everyone on PLAYERUKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS progress through Early Access. The amount of support and feedback we have received from our community has been incredible. I want to thank you all for your bug reports, feedback and suggestions. As we continue to fix bugs, improve gameplay and add new content, it’s important to for us to deliver you a fully realized and polished Battle Royale experience as we look towards launch.
Over the past few months I have done a lot of interviews, and in many of them, I said we hoped to be out of Early Access six months after we first launched. I’ve come to realize that restricting the window to a specific month could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met.
So, we have decided that we are going push the full launch back a bit from the initial six-month timeframe, but want to assure you that we are still planning a full release before the end of Q4 2017.
We will continue to push weekly and monthly updates until full launch as we want to ensure that the game we release is the best version possible. This is why we’re giving a launch window rather than an exact date. We hope this makes sense, and appreciate your understanding.
As always, I want to thank you all for your continued support.
See you in-game,
PLAYERUNKNOWN
Today I want to update everyone on PLAYERUKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS progress through Early Access. The amount of support and feedback we have received from our community has been incredible. I want to thank you all for your bug reports, feedback and suggestions. As we continue to fix bugs, improve gameplay and add new content, it’s important to for us to deliver you a fully realized and polished Battle Royale experience as we look towards launch.
Over the past few months I have done a lot of interviews, and in many of them, I said we hoped to be out of Early Access six months after we first launched. I’ve come to realize that restricting the window to a specific month could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met.
So, we have decided that we are going push the full launch back a bit from the initial six-month timeframe, but want to assure you that we are still planning a full release before the end of Q4 2017.
We will continue to push weekly and monthly updates until full launch as we want to ensure that the game we release is the best version possible. This is why we’re giving a launch window rather than an exact date. We hope this makes sense, and appreciate your understanding.
As always, I want to thank you all for your continued support.
See you in-game,
PLAYERUNKNOWN
As noted, the weekly patches and monthly content drops will continue throughout the remainder of the Early Access period. Also, you should probably buy this game. It's pretty great, and this is from someone that never really liked any of these types of games before.
I hated these "king of the hill" or "Battle Royale" style of game. PUBG showed me that those types of games can be fun, really fun. Every one that I tried before this one I actually hated. H1Z1 was just the buggiest, most convoluted mess ever. The War Z/World War Z/Infestation: Survivor Stories/Infestation: The New Z was just... laughably bad. The Culling was not great at all either. I tend to hate forced crafting mechanics in games like this. Not to mention that bad hit detection and again overly convoluted gameplay mechanics.
As far as Early Access goes, this is one of the few doing it "right." Weekly updates for bug fixes/optimizations, and monthly updates for new content drops. I think they have only taken one week off in all this time just because it was a ton of work they were constantly doing non-stop. I feel like if anybody was going to do it right, it was going to be the person that really kind of "made" this genre.
To me this is a deal breaker. I'd rather a game that lasts. I realize that's a lot to ask for, and of course you can't guarantee a game's continued success, but sometimes you can tell one is going to stick around. I'm currently playing Rocket League and Counter-Strike. I've played cs for 15 years, and it looks like I'll be able to enjoy Rocket League for at least a few more as well (especially since the developers seem to be amazing people). The base game doesn't change (although Counter-Strike is a bigger offender these days with Global Offensive, but hey, 15 years). If we're looking at a game that isn't complete, may or may not release by the end of the year, and then possibly get replaced by a well made AAA version, I think I'd rather wait for that AAA version. I want a game that doesn't require "weekly updates for bug fixes/optimizations," and I prefer all of my gameplay related "monthly updates for new content drops" to be included in the base game. I'm making the assumption that these content drops are gameplay related, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against others for enjoying it for what it is. I just can't get myself to do it. I have plenty of people on steam that are in this game all time time, so it's obviously doing something right! I feel I am more likely to enjoy "content drops" in mods to existing games, though. DotA was fun when it was an extension of Warcraft, for example. It wasn't my type of game, and I doubt that I would have ever tried the new DotA had I not played it in Warcraft originally. At this point I feel I'm rambling, though, so hopefully I got my point across.
I apparently played 43 hours of DayZ back when it first launched on Steam, which given the speed of that game isn't really a lot, but it's 4-5 times longer than i've put into most single player games so i don't feel cheated at all, especially as despite the bugs and bad performance i enjoyed my time with it. I can't really tell if it's improved at all since its initial release, it'll take a lot more than what they're doing to pull me back in, but even if it's just as bad now or worse that doesn't take away those 43 hours of good times i had.