H1Z1: King of the Kill is a major hit. It's sold seven million copies in its lifetime, according to SteamSpy, and yet for the last six months you probably haven't heard much about it. It takes an even bigger hit like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to completely overshadow a game like King of the Kill, selling 10 million copies in just a few months. But PUBG's arrival didn't signal the death of King of the Kill. Daybreak's battle royale shooter has been a fixture in the top five most played games on Steam and a popular viewing choice on Twitch for much of its time in Early Access.

I had a chance last week to chat with a few members of King of the Kill's development team about some of the changes coming to KotK (I'll have more specifics on that in the near future), but I also wanted to hear their thoughts on the popularity of PUBG, what that means for King of the Kill, and how they see the battle royale genre changing in the future.

Speaking with Anthony Castoro, general manager for H1Z1: King of the Kill, Dave  Mendelsohn, creative director, and Eric Correll, director of brand management and IP development at Daybreak, I asked whether any of the recent or upcoming changes to KotK, past or future, were made in response to PUBG's popularity.

"Our approach is definitely to focus on what would make our game better," said Anthony Castoro, "and we'll take that input from any source and put it through our design crew, so our focus has always been on [the] fast-paced nature and original roots of the game, and the high skill level required to be consistently in the top.

"Sometimes people might speculate that, oh, we were doing this because of PUBG, [and] we just chuckle because we were in the meetings in February where we decided to do it. The reality is a lot of that is just, there are conventions in shooting games that are pretty common, and when we were adopting best practices for our game and improving our game, some of those things are going to be similar to other games.

"But where we really focus [on] is what makes out game special and unique. We just sort of try to ignore any comparison there and focus on what is the experience that people [are] having that makes our game great and how can we double down on that."

For a long time, even with PUBG increasing in popularity, it looked like KotK's player count was remaining solid. PUBG was pulling in new players week over week, but it never appeared as if those players were leaving KotK behind. However, looking at SteamDB's charts for August and September, there does appear to be a dip in KotK's player counts.

"The game's peak [concurrent user count] is still really healthy and we're still in the top four on Steam," Castoro said. "There's some seasonality to what happens with our games and there's also a pattern of updates and things that are going to drive attention, right? And so, what we do know is that a lot of people who are playing Battlegrounds for the first time have never played or heard of our game, and we see that as a huge opportunity."

"We're excited about how many people are starting to get into that genre and the opportunity for us to grow as a result, so I wouldn't worry too much about what you're seeing in player counts and whether that's related to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds or not.

"As a matter of fact, since the [combat] update our numbers, particularly in Europe and NA are noticeably up, so we're really excited about that."

I also asked the team their thoughts about other developers and publishers jumping in to the battle royale genre. We've already seen a few try: there was a battle royale game called The Culling that appeared in March of last year, Ark took a swing with Survival of the Fittest, and both Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite have added or are adding battle royale modes.

"I'm somewhat surprised we haven't seen a little bit more because it's really compelling," Castoro said. "Everyone should be paying attention to this genre, and to what H1Z1 is doing, and what any other [BR game] comes in and does."

"Two of the top four games on Steam are this new sort of burgeoning genre," said Eric Correll, "so we're pretty proud that we were sort of the first game to take a big commercial risk on it and articulate it and innovate, and we're looking forward to continuing to innovate and sort of build our brand of battle royale as fast-paced and action-packed. 

"And we think there's an incredible market for that, and it will, as Anthony said, I think there's so much interest around it you can't ignore it. But we feel we have a great inside track in terms of how we do this last man standing genre."

After revising its schedule last month, PUBG declared its updates would become less regular so as to maintain a "high standard of quality" moving forward. The first patch post-shift is live on the game's test servers today and, as you might expect, it's a biggie. 

As you might already know, fog is en route to The Island. Chris expressed his concerns with this yesterday, and it seems quite a few of you feel the same judging by that post's comments. As in reality, the foggy weather effect "will hinder player sight on the map"—however the fact that this weather effect "has a low probability to occur" might console those less sold on the idea. 

Elsewhere, the September update adds the Mini-14 semi-automatic marksman rifle, and a new town named Kameshki, which is located east of Stalbar. Among the host of UI and gameplay tweaks the patch instils, my favourite is the fact that Tommy Guns have been removed from Care Packages and are now a world spawn. They're also now supported by Silencers, Vertical Foregrips and Magazines. Which is nice. 

Due on live servers later this week, here's Bluehole's schedule as per this Steam community post: 

Test servers: This week, test servers will be up for at least 2 days.

• KST: Tuesday evening
• CEST: Tuesday morning
• PDT: Tuesday early morning
• Live server update: Later this week—TBD 

As you probably noticed at the time, we dropped a host of exclusives at this year's PC Gaming Show at E3. And yet one of the  show's most anticipated features was vaulting mechanics in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

PUBG mastermind Brendan Greene made the announcement on stage and promised players would soon be able to vault objects like cars, walls, fences and containers. Via this Steam post, Bluehole has now outlined how the mechanics are coming along, and when we might expect to see them in-game.  

"We are aware that many players have been looking forward to trying it out," reads the post. "Our vaulting system is not built on predefined objects or locations in the map. There are tens of thousands of objects that should be vaultable or climbable in Erangel. 

"To perform the action, the geometry and properties of each object have to be dynamically detected and analyzed. The algorithm is quite complex and requires rigorous testing and fine-tuning of the map."

The post continues: "Testing it for only a couple of days before deployment on the Live servers won’t be enough for us to identify all bugs and side effects. Therefore, we are planning to test it for a longer period of time in early November. 

"If needed, we may roll it out on test servers for a certain amount of time even before November. Until then, we will be working on the feature internally. Please stay tuned for an update on the testing schedules for vaulting."

Despite mention of November above, Bluehole has released features ahead of time in the past. I wouldn't put it past it to jump the gun here.  

Whenever vaulting does arrive in PUBG, though, will it look as majestic as this?

I guess we'll find out either way in the next couple of months.

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.