PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds just tweeted some new screenshots that give us a foggy look at the new fog effects headed to the Early Access battle royale shooter, after teasing a single image earlier. Have a look above and below. The next update will also bring a new rifle and leaderboards for first-person servers, as well as the usual smattering of tweaks and bug-fixes.

I suppose my question is: do people really want to play PUBG in fog on a regular basis? I personally sort of hate fog. When it's foggy in Fallout 4, for example, I'll find the nearest bench, sit my butt down, and fast-forward time until it clears up. In a spooky horror game fog feels apropos, but in an action shooter I guess I'd rather be able to see as much as possible.

This week, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds surpassed ten million sales, a figure reached in just 165 days of Early Access release. And just under two weeks ago, the battle royale murder sandbox achieved the unthinkable by leapfrogging Dota 2's lofty concurrent player count. 

Now Bluehole's runaway megahit has passed one million concurrent players. Look, see: 

Can the juggernaut be stopped? It's showing very little signs of slowing down at present. Here's creator Brendan Greene's response to hitting the one million mark. 

I, and now over one million others, have said this umpteen times before, but: that's not bad going for an as yet unreleased game.  

Update: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' next update is almost upon us, bringing with it the new Mini-14 rifle, bug fixes, FPP leaderboards and foggy weather conditions. The game's official Twitter feed has teased how the latter will look in-game. 

PUBG's existing rain condition can transform battles. Thunder, for example, can mask heavy footfall; while an overcast sky can reduce draw distance. With fog, visibility is naturally compromised.    

Here's a glimpse of how it might look:

It's not without its detractors, but I personally love PUBG's rain and am looking forward to how fog will force players to adjust and adapt. As noted below, the game's imminent update is expected later this week. 

Original story: 

According to Wikipedia, the Mini-14 is "a lightweight .223 caliber rifle" that's favoured by "law enforcement, security personnel, hunters, ranchers and target shooters." We can soon add semi-naked, frying pan-wielding, battle royale fighters to that ensemble as the semi-automatic shooter is en route to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. 

Due in its next incoming update, the game's official Twitter account posted this earlier today:  

Having abandoned its regular monthly update schedule last month—so as to maintain a "high standard of quality" moving forward—PUBG's next build is for now without a concrete launch date. It is however expected next week, with test servers "up for at least two days early next week". 

When it arrives, it'll come with the Mini-14, new foggy weather conditions, FPP leaderboards and a handful of bug fixes.  

Every year PC Gamer's editors and contributors vote on a list of the 100 best PC games to play right now, and every year our Top 100 list is contentious. A game is always too low, and another too high, and another unbelievably missing. Such is the inevitable fate of any List Of Things In A Certain Order.

But this year, we decided it would be fun to transform the heated comment threads under our list into a list of their own—the Readers' Top 100. Last week, I asked you to pick your top two games from our Top 100 list, and suggest two games to add. I then compiled the votes (1,445 of them), weighing the write-ins more highly than the picks from our list, given that it's much more likely that 50 people would chose the same game from a list of 100 than all write in the same game.

My totally unscientific method does cause a few problems, namely: how much more do you weigh the write-in votes? A multiplier of three produced the most interesting list in this case, though next year I may ditch that tactic all together and take write-ins only. The danger is that a write-in-only list might be more easily swayed by organized campaigns (though that certainly happened anyway), and for this first attempt, I wanted to include a baseline to build off of just in case the suggestions were too scattered, or too homogeneous.

It worked out pretty well despite the uneven, improvised methodology—but do think of it as a fun exercise and not a perfect representation of PC gamers' tastes. Caveats out of the way, check out the list below. (Games that aren't on our Top 100 list are in bold.)

The PC Gamer Readers' Top 100

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
2. Half-Life 2 
3. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 
4. Dark Souls 
5. Borderlands 2 
6. Fallout: New Vegas 
7. Mass Effect 2  
8. Doom (2016) 
9. BioShock 
10. Doom 2 
11. Fallout 2 
12. Deus Ex 
13. Portal 2 
14. Life is Strange 
15. Starcraft 
16. Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn 
17. Grand Theft Auto 5 
18. League of Legends 
19. Diablo 2 
20. XCOM 2 
21. Fallout 4 
22. Dragon Age: Origins 
23. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind 
24. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds 
25. Bioshock Infinite 
26. Overwatch 
27. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 
28. World of Warcraft 
29. Rimworld 
30. Path of Exile 
31. Planescape: Torment
32. Fallout 
33. Dishonored 2 
34. Crysis 
35. Stellaris 
36. Crusader Kings 2 
37. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 
38. Dishonored 
39. Half-Life 
40. Warcraft 3 
41. Quake 
42. Factorio 
43. Prey 
44. SOMA 
45. Fallout 3
46. TIE Fighter 
47. Elite Dangerous 
48. Rocket League 
49. Civilization 5 
50. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 
51. Starcraft 2 
52. Nier: Automata 
53. Stalker: Call of Pripyat 
54. Wolfenstein: The New Order 
55. Minecraft 
56. System Shock 2 
57. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 
58. Psychonauts 
59. Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition 
60. Knights of the Old Republic 
61. Age of Empires 2 
62. Thief 2 
63. Endless Legend 
64. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 
65. Titanfall 2 
66. Warframe 
67. The Secret of Monkey Island  
68. Kerbal Space Program 
69. Europa Universalis IV 
70. Hotline Miami  
71. Payday 2 
72. Battlefield 1 
73. Dota 2 
74. Total War: Warhammer 
75. Mass Effect 3 
76. Batman Arkham City 
77. Rainbow Six Siege 
78. FTL 
79. Stardew Valley 
80. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 
81. The Talos Principle 
82. Tyranny 
83. Civilization 6 
84. Undertale 
85. Knights of the Old Republic 2 
86. Team Fortress 2 
87. The Witness 
88. Thief Gold 
89. Arma 3 
90. Dying Light 
91. Alien: Isolation 
92. Hyper Light Drifter 
93. Planet Coaster 
94. Jagged Alliance 2 
95. Call of Duty 2 
96. Transistor
97. Mass Effect 
98. Freespace 2 
99. 7 Days to Die 
100. Ultima Online

For reference, the top 10 games on our list this year were: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Dark Souls, Dishonored 2, XCOM 2, Portal 2, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Mass Effect 2, Alien: Isolation, Doom (2016), and Spelunky. If you want a condensed sense of how our tastes differ from those surveyed, here are a few observations:

We like Spelunky a lot more than everyone else. It was in our top 10, but didn't even make it into the Readers' Top 100.

While Half-Life 2 has lost some stock in our minds, it hasn't in everyone's. It was 11th on our list, but 2nd on the Readers' list.

Everyone agrees that The Witcher 3 is great. It was first on both of our lists.

Skyrim is still chugging along. It was 26th on our list, but came in third in reader voting.

Borderlands 2 wasn't on our list, but came in 5th. Did Borderlands fans came out en masse, or are we just weird for not putting it on our list?

14th place is pretty impressive for Life is Strange. Rimworld ranked pretty high, too. Either these games are more popular than we realized, or the survey happened to be circulated among their biggest fans. Probably a mix of both.

League of Legends fans showed up to challenge our preference for Dota 2. It came in at 18, while Dota 2 was knocked down to 73. Justice?

If you'd like to compare the lists directly, I've put them side by side in a spreadsheet. Thank you to all 1,445 people who responded to the survey! Feel free to suggest new ways to compile this list in the comments, and I'll take them into consideration next year. My skill with Excel spreadsheet formulas is at least double what it was last week, a cursed power that will only have grown by next year.

A couple of months back, PUBG executive producer Chang Han Kim said cross-platform play between PCs and consoles is something that is "definitely" on Bluehole's radar. Mastermind Brendan Greene has now confirmed this, and says he and his team are looking towards Destiny's well-balanced aim-assist to make cross-play "identical in terms of experience."

Whether or not this can be achieved remains to be seen, however the practicalities of such meticulous parity are "under heavy discussion." 

In conversation with gamesindustry.biz, Greene addressed cross-play directly: "We're looking into it. We'd like to see some form of cross-play, but we think it would only be fair if it was keyboard and mouse versus keyboard and mouse, or controller versus controller. But it's still under heavy discussion.

"There are games like Destiny that really get auto-aim and controllers in an FPS feeling good. And I think that with Microsoft's help it's really going to get it feeling like a good shooter on console. We want to give the same experience. We want PC and Xbox to be identical in terms of the experience you have playing the game."

Greene adds that partnering with Microsoft has introduced Bluehole to a "network of studios", including Rare, the team behind forthcoming pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves. As the developer has teased via a series of video diaries, Sea of Thieves' water looks great—which is something Greene reckons could at some stage help PUBG.   

"I was... talking to the Sea of Thieves guys. They said they loved the game, they play it a lot, but, 'Oh, you're water.' I mean, our water is not very good, but Rare has great water tech. They said, 'We should share some knowledge.' That's a great thing about being part of a network of studios. We can get that water tech, essentially for free, and we can share stuff with them. That's just invaluable, because their water is great. Having that would really finish off our world nicely."

Following a report earlier today that Oceania players wouldn't get access to dedicated first-person servers in PUBG for a while, the creators have announced that, actually, a dedicated server will launch today.

Apologising for the prolonged period of silence around the issue, the official announcement reads like this:

"We are pleased to announce that first-person only servers for DUO will now be available for players in Oceania. Starting from 3 pm KST / 3:30 pm ACST today, players will be able to enjoy FPP DUO on OCE servers. For SOLO and SQUAD, we plan to introduce FPP at a later stage when we have an increased user pool on OCE servers in order to ensure a pleasant experience for all Oceanic players."

The announcement also provides some more fleshed out reasons for the studio's previous reluctance. "One of our main concerns was the fact that it can affect the other group of players who do not play FPP. It has been proven by the data from other regions that we need at least 500 players for two game modes to ensure a reasonable matchmaking time. Currently, the number of concurrent users on OCE is sometimes lower than the threshold during certain times.  

"According to our data, about 20% of the entire Oceanic player base plays FPP on servers in other regions. Adding another game mode now can make it difficult to sustain matches at all times. Furthermore, we will add a new map when we move out of Early Access later this year. All of these factors would result in a divided player base for each of these modes and ultimately affect the time required for matchmaking, especially in those regions with a smaller player base."

Whatever the case, player consternation in the Oceania region seems to have influenced the switch, so while only DUO is supported now, full support should come in the future. It's worth reading the whole announcement over here.