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Bluehole have filled in their development roadmap for the rest of 2017, paving the way for the game’s 1.0 release on PC and an Xbox Game Preview release by the end of the year.
Bluehole, acknowledging their promises to deliver a full release to the PC by the end of 2017, has mentioned in their latest Steam Update that with just 11 weeks left before their self-imposed deadline, the development team is hard at work day and night to ship a finished product.
Currently, the team claim they have an internal build that includes vaulting and climbing, the desert map, new vehicles and a 3D replay feature. However, the team at Bluehole has said that this isn’t ready for public consumption yet, and it needs more optimisation and stabilisation before releasing it to the game’s huge playerbase.
There’s a new patch coming this week, the last before the game’s official release: “For PC, we will be only focusing on doing our best to stabilize the launch build and we don’t have any plans to deploy patches to live servers except for this week,” the blog post said.
“However, there will be features like vaulting and climbing which will have a huge impact on the game and need to be tested for at least a month. We will be running test servers at least three times in preparation for that. Through these test servers, we would like to conduct large scale tests for the content and features that are not in the live build and create a foundation for a very stable official launch.”
The three phases for tests are as followed, copied again from the blog post:
“1st phase: Focus on testing vaulting & climbing
2nd phase: More testing of vaulting & climbing, test other new content and features
3rd phase: All new content and features including the desert map
The content and features that will be in test servers need to be tested for at least 2 to 4 weeks. It will be very difficult for us to provide a stable service if we rush updates to live servers after short bursts of testing. As we would like to go through rigorous testing to prepare for official launch, we will not be updating new content to live servers and run test servers for a longer period of time instead.”
This first phase should be coming in late October or early November, although the team plan to detail exact testing time later.
In other news, the game’s leaderboards are now broken as a result of the huge influx of players. Updates to the leaderboard system means that the leaderboards are currently offline until October 20.
Patch notes for this week are fairly low impact. The bug which saw flaming characters from the starting island leaving a tremendous fiery trail behind them on the plane is gone, as is a bug which allowed a player to hold a primarily weapon and a frying pan at the same time. There are less items spawning on the starting island too, to adjust the item balance on the northeast side of the Erangel map. Low impact stuff, but as the team gear up for a 1.0 launch, most of the work is probably going on behind the scenes.
