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It’s been two months since Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene took to the stage at E3 to show off vaulting and climbing mechanics for early access smash-hit PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
These mechanics have proven to be slightly tougher to implement than expected, with the original map not having been designed with vaulting in climbing in mind, and as a result the system needs to be responsive to deal with objects at different heights.
Today, a work-in-progress look at how the development is going on the system was revealed, and the results are impressive.
On a competitive level, this will change the entire face of the game. At the moment, buildings are veritable castles, often with just a few small entrances, and the second floor of a house functioning as a bunker, as long as you can hold the staircase. This change should allow people to sneak in to these bunkers by scaling outer walls, clambering onto balconies or rooftops to attack from unseen angles.
This will require a huge mental shift both from players that are looking to utilise these new attack routes, but also those looking to defend against them. There’s also the fact that vaulting will allow new ways to move, using the terrain in a smarter way to move both in firefights and for faster looting.
Here’s a video, which stresses that the animations seen here are placeholders. It seems here — and is stated in the video description — that traversal speed is based on the velocity of the character.
The video also appears to allow characters to drop away from a vault or jump, meaning you can use it to throw yourself up a wall to see over it, or you can let go of clambering up to a window if you see someone there with a shotgun.
There’s no release date for the mechanics, but it’s likely it will be delivered in a monthly update, although it’s very unlikely to be the one in September. Either way, it should be in the game by the time it launches, which is planned to be somewhere before the end of 2017.
