This feature was originally published in PC Gamer magazine in mid-October. As such, the stats here are out of date, but we've kept them here for context and ease-of-reading in the article—PUBG's peak concurrent users now exceed 2.5 million per day. It's fair to assume the desert map has come a long way since our hands-on below, too. If you enjoy this feature, you can currently subscribe to our magazine for less in our holiday sale. 

Every single second in Asia, a new solo match of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds begins. At peak times, that number rises to ten new games per second. With a concurrent player count that has recently swollen to over 1.5 million, an unanticipated problem has arisen for the unanticipated smash hit. PUBG's cloud server service simply doesn't have enough servers to accommodate the Early Access battle royale shooter's massive and still-growing playerbase. 

I'm given this information during a visit to the offices of Bluehole, PUBG's developer, in South Korea. Over the two days I've been here, I've twice tried to interview platform team lead Seungwoo Shin, who is in charge of PUBG's servers. Whenever we've attempted to talk, he's been simply (and understandably) too busy. We finally get to speak for about 15 minutes on my second day, and throughout the interview I feel mildly guilty for cornering him in a conference room: while soft-spoken and incredibly polite, Shin has the restless body language of a man who knows that he is desperately needed elsewhere.

Shin tells me through interpreter Sammie Kang (PUBG's marketing and events manager) that he only came into the office once every few days as a consultant when he began working on PUBG. As Bluehole's last-person-standing shooter quickly grew to become one of the most-played games in the world, Shin's somewhat casual job became, shall we say, a bit more demanding.

"So, now our team has to come into the office every weekend and manually monitor all the servers," Shin says. "It would be done automatically, usually, but we have to monitor server capacity very closely and make sure the servers are available for certain regions if there's a great increase in certain areas."

Shin also tells me briefly about his history in the tech industry. He attended KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (basically, Korea's equivalent to MIT). Early in his career, he founded an IT company, then took a long break. He returned to work to become an engineer for Bluehole Ginno Games' MMORPG Devilian, then he took an even longer break, for two years, which he spent living in Australia.

"How long of a break will you need after Battlegrounds?" I ask.

Shin doesn't wait for Kang to translate, and he answers in English, laughing softly, "Forever."

First man standing

Shin isn't the only one at Bluehole who attended KAIST. Chang Han Kim, CEO of the newly formed PUBG Corp, also attended, acquiring a PhD in computer science (Kim is also the one who invited Shin to work on both Devilian and PUBG). Kim, more commonly called CH, has been in the gaming industry for over 16 years. "I'm not someone who started this because I was in love with games," he says, with Kang interpreting. "I'm more like a startup entrepreneur, that's how I started my career, I was a founder of different companies in the past." Those 16 years, as he describes them, were not successful. "I kept failing," he says. "And I was desperate and miserable after failing for 16 years and I was, like, maybe I should stop making games. I really should give up."

While CH was preparing to launch MMO Devilian in North America with publisher Trion, he discovered Steam and Twitch. At the time, he says, everyone in Korea was focused on mobile games. But CH saw how many users were on Steam's platform, and examined its Early Access programs, as well as other crowdfunding tools like Kickstarter. He decided to try again. "I don't mind failing again, so what about we try something new?"

"No one was making a serious PC game here, and no one in America knew about us. We were just a small Asian company that's based in Korea, and I thought if we had this can-do attitude and not be afraid of failing, we will learn something valuable."

The puzzle pieces began to come together: the popularity of Steam and Twitch, and the rise of survival games in Early Access following DayZ. Plus, Brendan Greene, creator of battle royale mods for Arma 2 and Arma 3, had finished working on H1Z1: King of the Kill and returned to Ireland.

"I looked deeper into it and came to realise [H1Z1] wasn't really [Brendan's] project," CH says. "He helped bring King of the Kill to H1Z1, but he was a consultant for [about] a month or so. They had this base game which is a zombie survival, and King of the Kill was just a mode on top of it, so it wasn't [Brendan's] kind of battle royale. And he still wanted to do something more that could help him create the battle royale he wanted, and I wanted to create a true standalone battle royale that [was] made from scratch, and was solely focused on creating that battle royale experience from start to end." 

The rest is—and continues to make—gaming history, as PUBG keeps shattering records and racking up milestones seemingly every few weeks. With over 13.5 million copies sold (20 million in the time since publication—ed), and PUBG climbing the Steam charts to overtake every other game's player counts (including Dota 2's). Greene sums up Battlegrounds' rise: "It's been a crazy year.

"When I first had my interview here with the management," Greene says, "my job interview, essentially, they said to me, 'How many copies do you expect to sell?' and I kind of just said, 'Oh, a million, month one.' And that was my own confidence in the game mode. I thought it would do well. But I didn't expect the success we've seen. I don't think anyone in here expected it. And it's been a hell of a ride."

"We never had numbers as our goal, and success wasn't our goal at all when we first started," CH says. "I told the team, if we achieve the goals, the numbers will follow us, the success will follow afterwards, and our goal was to make the best battle royale—our vision when we first started this.

"Our goal was to deliver PC 1.0, fully release it by the end of this year and deliver it to our customers. That was our goal. And I keep telling it to our team, and I think that's what keeps them motivated and that's why they don't really care about numbers and they can still be hard at work trying to meet that goal."

Part of that vision for PUBG's exit from Early Access is the arrival of a new desert map, the second planned arena for Battlegrounds. The map is a work in progress, with some textures, features and even entire locations missing: a large city has been removed from the build I'm touring until it's better optimised, and the zone marked for a military base is currently barren. What is available, however, feels like a natural fit for PUBG's looting and shooting. Far from the barren sandscape I'm half-expecting as I become (I'm told) the first person outside Bluehole to set virtual foot inside it, I instead find a sprawling battle arena dotted with desert trees, cacti and a surprising number of buildings. It's immediately noticeable how much more variation there is to the terrain than in Erangel, PUBG's current map. There are hills, rises and ditches in the landscape, which create lots of opportunities for cover from sniper fire or, alternatively, convenient places to stage an ambush. I'm told by art director Tae-Seok Jang, who I chat with over Skype—it's a little odd that I have flown from California to South Korea and wound up talking via video with Bluehole's new office in Madison, Wisconsin—that the varied terrain will make a difference not just for those running around in PUBG, but also those driving.

"It should feel different and difficult when you're driving your vehicles on different parts of the world," Jang tells me, with Kang interpreting. "So, we really want to create a unique experience on our new map, so when you're actually driving off-road it feels like it's realistic and different, so we want to really pursue that.

"On top of that, when you use a clean paved road you'd be able to move faster, but you should be exposed more to your enemies, so we really want to take that into account. And when you're in bumpy environments, you should be able to find cover pretty easily, but you're taking a shortcut to get somewhere, so it should be difficult to drive."

It does feel, in my limited time on the new map, like there is a real difference: going off-road feels like a bumpier experience, with less solid control over the vehicles than while driving on terrain in the original map.

"But it really depends on which vehicle you have, so you should be able to make a choice, which vehicle you prefer for your strategy. Like, some vehicles will be more optimised for clean roads, some will be more optimised for off-road driving."

I'm not playing a match on the desert map (which at this point has not even been named), I'm just exploring, and with developer tools enabled I can also enable flying (complete with my character extending a single arm in front of him, like Superman) to quickly speed to distant locations—especially useful since, even with the map not yet complete, there is still the blue circle of death closing around me.

DayG

With Mexico serving as a source of inspiration for the map, it makes sense that I eventually find a colourful wrestling arena, sure to draw a number of fistfights and melee engagements when players get their hands on it. I also come across a prison, though the land it's situated on may be removed in favour of water: the river, currently snaking around the edges of the desert, may be replaced with ocean to the eastern and southern sides of the map, reminiscent of Chernarus from Bohemia's Arma and DayZ. Either way, despite the desert environment, boats will be in play.

My favourite spots to stop flying and begin running again are three ancient meteor impact craters with small towns inside them, abandoned shops and homes built right on the sunken crater floor. One such town, with more echoes of DayZ, sports the still-burning wreck of a crashed plane. Even with no opponents on the map with me, I can anticipate the tension of looting the buildings in these craters, eyes constantly scanning the high ridge that circles the town for the movement of opportunistic snipers. Even better, I imagine, will be when the blue circle happens to close on one of the crater towns at the end of a match, giving the advantage not to the players peering down from the ridge but to those already hunkered somewhere inside one of the buildings.

"When I first started making battle royale back in Arma 2," Greene says, "I had four maps that sort of randomly rotated, and you never really knew which map you were playing on. The idea was that the more maps you have, the more you're testing the player because they can't remember every detail about the map." I point out that players of CS:GO, for example, are often happier sticking with one map, like de_dust2, playing it for years on end until they've memorised the layout, the geometry, every route and feature and quirk, until they can play it essentially on autopilot.

"That's why I created battle royale in the first place," says Greene. "Because what I thought was like, with CS:GO, you know every pixel on the map. And for me, battle royale was set up to test a player in the moment. And it wasn't reliant on their knowledge of every pixel on the map. You have to be the better player.

"Yes, players like to be kept in a comfort zone. 'I love this map because I know it backwards.' And the whole idea behind the battle royale game mode is to take them out of their comfort zone, and kind of make them think, and make a game hard, basically, for them, which I think we've shown [with PUBG] that players like hard games."

Desert storm

I ask both Greene and Jang about possibilities for the future of the desert map. While PUBG has had foggy weather added recently, sandstorms would feel much more appropriate here. The dusty setting dotted with cacti also gives the map a real cowboy feel. Might we see six-shooters instead of AK-47s? Instead of travelling the map in cars, how about on horses?

"So our [action and gunplay lead] Pawel [Smolewski] really wants to do that," Jang says in regard to horses. "And there are a lot of Western movies that are based on desert areas, so we would love to see places where you think, 'Oh, you could make a western movie in this area,' so the sky's the limit. We'd love to see that and that is something players would love to see. So, who knows?" There's a laugh. "Pawel wants to do it."

And, while the Erangel map features matches set during different times of the day, PUBG players may get to see something a bit more extreme in the desert: nighttime.

"Another thing we're testing is when it's dark, it's not really dark-dark, it's not like in the middle of the night or midnight, but it's dark enough so it feels a bit different, so we're going to test it. We don't know if we're going to roll it out, but we're seeing how things are with lighting."

With the new map and vaulting in PUBG's near future, Bluehole is also looking further down the line for features like mod support (which won't arrive until "next year, at this stage", according to Greene), and of course the formation of the new Bluehole subsidiary to manage "development and global business opportunities" for Battlegrounds. I ask about the new company, though I'm not told much about what it might mean for the future of Battlegrounds. In fact, during my visit, it sounds like they haven't settled on a name yet—all CH will say is that ‘PUBG' will probably be in the title (the day after I leave South Korea, it's announced as PUBG Corp).

Greene doesn't have a lot to say about the subsidiary, either. "That's all bizdev," he tells me, though a moment later he grows more excited. "Like, I've heard that we're the PUBG company. And that's awesome. It's like, you know, my fucking name's in a company, like, what the fuck?"

Earlier this year, Chris became the first person outside of the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds team to set foot in the shooter's upcoming desert map. He wrote about his experiences here (look out for the magazine piece on the website tomorrow at 1pm GMT/5am PT), whereafter Brendan Greene shared four new images from the work-in-progress setting. 

Now, Nvidia has posted five new desert-set shots that tease the map's sprawling planes, abandoned car-strewn thoroughfares, hidey-hole houses and multi-storey buildings.

"Oils rigs, canyon walls, towers and cranes should make for some interesting snipping, while the more dense cityscapes should intensify scavenging," says Nvidia. "The desolate landscape is sure to make for some white-knuckle final circle encounters, as there is not a lot of landscape cover when the circle tightens and forces you into open areas."

Nvidia adds that 5,000 GeForce Experience users stand to receive PUBG free-of-charge simply by using the GTX companion application—with the GPU manufacturer distributing game codes at random on November 21. 

Let us know what you think of the incoming desert map in the comments below, and check out the seven new maps we'd love to see in PUBG.

A pair of previously-unseen vehicles—a pickup truck and a jet ski—have been dug out of the Playerunknown's Battlegrounds test code by a redditor named Art_7s. The dataminer also found a mode for a new weapon, the DP-28, a Soviet light machine gun that was introduced in the late 1920s.

They all look a little rough around the edges (and the jet ski looks like a clog with handlebars), but "these are just the raw assets without the UE4 PBR materials so they’re gonna look like crap as is," Art_7s said in the thread. "But when they’re in game they should look about the same quality as the rest of the vehicles." 

The presence of assets in test code is no guarantee that they're going to see the light of day (although how PUBG Corp could take a pass on a jet ski, I have no idea) but it seems likely that they will: PUBG creative director Brendan Greene said in September that three new vehicles were in the works, including the VW microbus—which Art_7s also pulled out of the code.

Update: The post originally indicated that the DP-28 was from the 1950s. It was in fact first adopted by the Soviet military in 1928, and phased out of service in the 1960s. 

Like a sandstorm looming on the horizon, preparing to throw sand in your eyes and fill your mouth with cacti and turn you into a tumbleweed (note: I have never been in a sandstorm so that depiction may not be strictly accurate) PUBG's new desert map is headed our way. But while the map should be here by year's end (we were recently teased with some new images), it's never too early to start getting impatient for the next next PUBG map. 

What other settings would we like to see brought to the popular battle royale shooter? Here's a list of my dream locations.

The post-apocalypse

I mean, yeah, PUBG already has a post-apocalypse vibe to it: an island stripped of its population, abandoned buildings, merciless gangs of horn-honkers, and so forth. Something apocalyptic, to some degree, has definitely happened in the world of PUBG, but it can't have been all that cataclysmic. There's still a lot of organization: there must be an entire staff arranging flights and air drops and red-zone bombings, not to mention the dozens of people who stuff the island's buildings with pristine weapons and gear and pants and who carefully park cars before a match.

I'm talking about a proper post-apocalypse, like from Mad Max. Humanity on the brink of extinction. Toxic swamps and mountains of bleached bones and pillars of oily, black smoke. A world where even a sane person would be just like, "Yeah, I'll fight 99 people for the chance at a chicken dinner, it's way better than eating the remains of this inbred mutant warlord I just beat to death with the club made from my father's femur."

A frozen world

Snow is cool in games, but it's usually almost entirely cosmetic. I played the Frostpunk demo recently (speaking of the post-apocalypse), and loved that the snow felt more real than in most games, even though it's a city-builder and not an FPS.

My favorite detail was the way the snow would pile in drifts, and my collection of starving, occasionally cannibalistic workers would have to push their way through it to gather coal and wood. Their shivering bodies would leave grooves through the snow behind them, which would then fill up again as more snow fell. Imagine in PUBG being able to track enemy players through footprints in the frost (as you can in battle royale game The Darwin Project), or spotting a puff of condensation rising from a bush, indicating someone is hiding there. Snow doesn't need to just be pretty, it can actually change the world it falls on.

 Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, China

"Verticality" gets tossed around a lot when devs talk about maps, though It's not something I myself have felt a strong desire for very often. I prefer to have my enemies aiming at me from as few directions as possible, and it's rare that I find myself thinking, "You know, instead of getting shot in the back of the head, I wish I could get shot in the top of the head."

But fine, let's do it! Let's get vertical. Screw buildings, though, they're frame rate killers: let's just rely on nature. Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in China is vertical as fuck (don't complain to me about the f-bomb, that's the park's actual tourism slogan). Throw in some of those wobbly rope-n-plank bridges, some ziplines, hang gliders, and maybe a grappling hook, and you've got yourself a beautiful and picturesque place to get shot in the top of the head.

If you're wondering on a map without buildings where you'd find all that great PUBG gear, it's simple. Bird nests.

A lavishly furnished underground missile silo

Prepping for the end of the world is a popular pastime, and no one preps more lavishly than the super rich. Forget backyard bunkers and a few crates of canned meals, the hot ticket for people with gobs of cash is buying decommissioned missile silos that have been transformed into multi-million dollar condominiums.

This is, like, a real thing, apparently. For it to work with PUBG it would need to be a really massive silo, like something from Hugh Howey's Silo books. Instead of a circle closing from the sides, it would close from the top and bottom, forcing players onto a final, specific floor of the silo. Where will this match end? The movie theater? The gym? The nightclub? The golf course? (I assume there will be a golf course down there somewhere.)

A space station—let me finish!—in space

Games have a storied history of worlds built inside rings, from Halo to Planescape to, well, Ringworld. I think some sort of space-station ringworld would be a killer place for PUBG. It being in space and all, I don't see why you couldn't walk off the edge of the ring (while wearing a space suit) and then onto to underside of it and run around down there, too. Space lets you do stuff like that.

Plus, imagine the sniping! Shooting from your location, through outer space, to hit some dude running around on another part of the ring. It also would give you a nice view of the earth during your long minutes spent hiding in a bush and waiting for everyone else to kill each other (this is how I play).

A rat map

When I was a kid there was a company that made oversized items, like a giant pencils. You could buy them and put them in your house. I'm currently struggling to understand why I wanted a giant pencil in my room so much as a kid, but I definitely, definitely did. More than anything, I wanted a giant pencil. I think there's maybe some weird appeal in feeling like you've been hit by a shrink ray and all the tiny things are now huge?

It could explain rat maps. There are lots of them for CS:GO and I recall playing a few in TF2. Why not PUBG? Players would start spread all over the map of the house, fight their way through garages and bathrooms and those areas behind the wall accessed through mouse holes, for a climactic showdown on top of the bureau or under the fridge or among magazines and beer bottles on the coffee table. Winner winner simply enormous chicken dinner.

Skyrim

This is my dream list, so why not Skyrim? Players are dropped (from dragons) onto the map, and must loot weapons and gear (marked in red when it's considered stealing) and then are pursued by a shrinking circle of mudcrabs (or even worse,  a shrinking circle of NPCs talking about mudcrabs). 

Okay, maybe not actually Skyrim, but a fantasy setting would be a fun place for battle royale. Ruins are more interesting than ruined buildings. Castles are more interesting to loot than warehouses and airplane hangars. Runes carved into stone walls are better than the typical end-of-days graffiti we're used to seeing. And riding horses or wargs is better than driving cars. You can't do sick flips onto houses, but they also don't explode.