Bluehole, the studio developing battle royale shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has announced a change to its patch release schedule for the title. In a blog post on Steam, they stated this change was needed to improve how the studio functions as well as setting realistic expectations for players.
Currently, the game gets one large monthly patch and smaller patches on a weekly basis. With this change, till the game’s official release later this year you can expect to see a markedly lower number of patches released in a less regimented cadence. With this slightly reduced rate of patches, we can expect that balance changes and fixes also to take longer than what is the current standard.
“We’ve found internally that being rushed to finish certain features, and having shorter QA test time between pushing updates caused more issues than it solved in regards to maintaining a high standard of quality. We want to put our best content out, and ensure that everything we do is making the game more enjoyable with every update.
Although we may not release a weekly patch, we will utilize the test servers for significantly longer periods of time and deploy patches and hotfixes when necessary.”
Test servers will still be running though if the developers wish to deploy and test a feature. With the resources pulled from the patch teams, we might see more Q&A before a release and thus less buggy releases.
That said, test servers will remain open for when the studio wants to deploy a feature, big or small. Not guaranteeing patches on a fixed schedule also means changes are allowed to take longer on test servers, hopefully resulting in a smoother launch.
Bluehole states that this in no way will affect the amount of content which will be on offer in the final game or that the studio plans to stop working on the title. In closing they also stated that
“We will still inform our community with public patch notes outlining changes we’ve made with each update.”
