PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds introduced map selection in April, which allowed players to choose between its Erangel and Miramar arenas for the first time. "We'll still have to keep a close eye on it," said developer PUBG Corp at the time, "since it could become problematic as new maps continue to be added."

Following its fourth round of testing, the developer says it will scale back map selection options when Sanhok lands later this month. 

"It’s now become clear to us that these concerns were justified, and we’ve decided that we can’t support individual map selection for more than two maps," says the dev in this Steam Community update. "This is because map selection creates an essentially exponential increase in the number of total separate queues when combined with other queue options like party size and perspective. 

"That means the matchmaking pool gets split into many small sections, making it nearly impossible to put together a match in at least some of those queues."

PUBG Corp vows to make Sanhok as accessible as possible—Sanhok proves that solo PUBG plays best on a small map, after all—but says Miramar and Erangel will again return to the same queue. This means players can no longer choose between the latter, and will instead be allocated at random should they select this queue. 

"Choosing both queues means you’ll randomly be dropped into one of the three maps currently in the game," the post adds. 

Read more on the above in this direction. As Chris reported from E3, PUBG's winter map will be somewhere between Miramar and Sanhok in size. 

At Microsoft's E3 press conference, the trailer for PUBG contained an exciting little kicker at the end: a brief glimpse of a snowy winter map. Appropriately, the map is coming sometime this winter.

I spoke to PUBG's creative director Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene at E3 this week, and asked if the snowy footprints shown in the teaser would be a feature of the winter map. "We of course would like to have footprint tracking in the snow, you know," said Greene, "but I can't promise anything now. It's very early."

I was also curious about the size of the winter map: will it be another 8x8km map like Erangel and Miramar, PUBG's first two maps? Or, will it be smaller, like PUBG's third map, the 4x4km Sanhok, which will be released on PC on June 22?

"No, we're looking at somewhere in between," Greene told me.

"We found 8-by-8, it's great, but it takes an inordinate amount of time to get maps of that scale done. So, we're looking from a gameplay point of view, we might shrink it down a little bit," Greene said. "We don't have exact sizing yet, but it'll be somewhere in between I think."

Update: After four rounds of testing, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' 4x4km tropical Sanhok map is live. 

The latest arena is inspired by real world Thailand, includes a cave system, and proves that solo PUBG plays best on a small map. It lands alongside its recently revealed 'Event Pass' rewards scheme, which bills itself as "trackable progression-related system". A newly-launched microsite offers more on what that's all about. 

As we learned last week, Sanhok testing forced developer PUBG Corp to scale back map selection—however this only directly affects previous battlegrounds Miramar and Erangel. 

For the first time ever, PUBG is on sale on Steam. 

Original story: 

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' third map, Sanhok, will be released on June 22 on PC, an update on Steam confirmed today. After several rounds of beta testing, the new map is just about ready for prime time. The Steam update also mentions that the map will be coming to Xbox in "late summer 2018."

Sanhok was formerly known as Codename Savage, and is a tropical 4x4 kilometer battleground much smaller than the original setting. We like it that way: it makes for fast, frenetic combat.