PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has come a long way. From Steam early access phenomenon to popularising the battle royale genre, PUBG has enjoyed millions of players across multiple platforms.
On PC, though, PUBG’s peak appears behind it. It has an astonishing all-time peak of 3.2m concurrent players on Steam, but that was achieved two years ago, in January 2018. Nowadays, PUBG peaks in the 600,000s.
This is not to say PUBG is done and dusted. It remains a massive game on Steam, the third-most popular game on Valve’s platform, in fact, behind only Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. And the developers of PUBG continue to update the game in a bid to keep its playerbase interested and active. Recently, we heard about the experimental Bluehole mode, a way of playing the game that forces “circle squatters” to keep moving. The latest development is a brand new map called Karakin that has something that sounds very much like Bluehole Mode, but with a twist. It’s called the Black Zone, and it levels buildings. The idea is it keeps players on edge, discourages camping and gets everyone moving – all across one of the game’s smallest maps.
To find out more about Karakin, and to ask more general questions about PUBG’s transition to the PS5 and Xbox Series X and whether or not there’s a need for a PUBG 2, we had a chat with Dave Curd, the studio head at PUBG Madison and creative director of the new map. Here’s how it went.
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So how long have you been working on Karakin? It kind of came out of nowhere.
Dave Curd: This has been pretty pleasant because nothing leaked. We’re very proud of that. I’d say the team has been pencils down, probably about six months, from those initial ideas of, hey, we want to try a more dynamic map – how can we spice up gameplay? – to, okay, it’s out on the test server. It was probably a six month push.
How many maps do you have in development at one time in various stages? Do you have a few on the go? Or do you just pick one idea to run with?
Dave Curd: Every team has their own mission. And there’s a million ideas floating around all the time. But we always have to be working on one thing together to make sure development goes smoothly.
This map seems a little bit more scaled back compared to the last one, Vikendi. It’s a bit smaller and there are fewer weird and wacky locations. Why did you go for a smaller map?
Dave Curd: It’s really stripped down because form follows function, right? We know we wanted to try something new and dynamic. The idea of the Black Zone to where buildings can be destroyed and replaced with ruins. The idea to try out bullet penetration and breach walls. These are all new, unproven things. So we wanted to have a map of the appropriate scale to make sure everything ran well, everything was performant.