One of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' defining features is its ever-tightening play area. Anyone caught outside of that area is said to be in the blue zone, and gradually takes damage over time. Well, the development team plans to ramp up the damage that the blue zone deals to try and get players to focus on combat inside the play area, it announced yesterday.

The change will first arrive in the test servers early next week, the team said in a Steam post. "From this new update, you will be able to focus more on the immediate, close-ranged skirmishes inside the play zone, instead of dealing with enemies outside of the play zone during the mid to late phases of the game. We would love to hear the responses regarding the changes from all members of our community once you’ve tried it in the test servers."

Personally, I think it's a good idea, and could encourage a quicker pace as players rush to get safe. Let's see how it goes, though.

In other news, new vaulting and climbing mechanics—which Christopher tried out last week—will arrive on the game's test servers in early November. The game is on track to release before the end of the year, but any updates being tested before then (including vaulting and blue zone damage) won't be rolled out to the live servers until full release. "It is not always easy to merge the changes to our live build, because our development build and live build are separate," the team said.

"Therefore, we have decided to merge improvements, bug fixes, and other features, all at once to the test servers, which will then be implemented cumulatively for the 1.0 release."

Developer Bluehole will have to address the issue of hacking, too, which remains a problem, particularly towards the top of the leaderboards (a place that I can only dream about). The official account for the game's anti-cheat service said yesterday that it had banned 25,000 players in the preceding 24 hours.

This issue, we tackle the biggest game on PC right now: the seemingly unstoppable PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Chris Livingston visited Bluehole's South Korean studio to find out the story behind the battle royale shooter's surprising success. We also get exclusive access to the upcoming desert map and new vaulting mechanics. You'll find it all in this month's massive eight page cover feature.

Elsewhere, Fraser Brown details the history of Civilization—talking to every lead designer of the stately 4X series' six main games. It's a fascinating look at the evolution of an enduring classic. Also, Andy talks to adventure game designers about the future of the point 'n' click, and we put gamepads to the test in our hardware roundup. All that, and this month's free gift: an Onslaught skin for Paladins: Champions of the Realm beefcake Fernando.

Issue 311 is on shelves now and available on all your digital devices from Google Play, the App Store and Zinio. You can also order direct from My Favourite Magazines or purchase a subscription to save yourself some cash, receive monthly deliveries and enjoy our exclusive subscriber covers. Here's this month's:

This month we...

• Get exclusive hands-on with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' new map
• Chart the history of the Civilization series
• Ask game designers about the future of adventure games
• Use an Empire At War mod to hold the ultimate Star Wars vs Star Trek showdown
• Revisit Arkane's Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
• Round-up the best gamepads you can buy today
• Exclusively reveal Petroglyph's new RTS, Forged Battalion
• Review Total War: Warhammer II, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and more...

Until next month!

On the back of the success of battle royale games like H1Z1 and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, it's no great surprise that other developers are looking to shoulder their way into the genre. On PC we've already seen GTA Online and Fortnite add BR modes (with some objection on the latter from PUBG Corp), and in August we learned (via this tweet from industry analyst Daniel Ahmad) that a Chinese mobile game based on Terminator 2 would feature an suspiciously PUBG-lookin' BR mode as well.

Today some footage of the mobile game's BR mode surfaced on Reddit in a post from user llllghye. You can peep it above, and wow, yes, that certainly looks very PUBG in a way that one could easily label it a clone. They didn't even change the blue electrical field of death to a different color. Come on! Make it mauve or salmon or coquelicot at least.

From the parts of the UI I can understand in the video (the numbers) it looks like the max player count in the footage is only 11, which wouldn't make for such a gripping BR match unless the map was considerably smaller (though the mobile game is reportedly supposed to support nearly 50 players).

What battle royale has to do with Terminator 2 is a bit unclear to me. Battle royale features competitors gathering weapons and fighting in a shrinking space until only one is left, while Terminator 2 features Linda Hamilton being totally ripped and battling a liquid metal robot from the future that was trying to kill a teenage boy to make him stop talking in his annoyingly screechy voice (I assume that was its goal). Maybe Linda Hamilton is in one of the airdropped supply crates?

The T2 mobile game comes from NetEase, which in partnership with Blizzard also operates online games like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft 2 in China.