Although PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds released for PC via Steam's Early Access service back in March of this year, it seems as if the battle royale game has been in the beta program for nearly an eternity. Now, thankfully, it looks as if the competitive survival shooter will finally go live as a full release, as the title's developers have officially announced that it is leaving Early Access later this evening.
As seen in the tweet below from the official PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Twitter account, the servers are going to be offline for several hours starting at 4:00 PM PST and ending around 11:00 PM PST to prep for the shift from Early Access title to full-fledged game. The developers also wanted to remind fans to "Please note that once the live servers go into maintenance, the test servers will also be closed" in order to "ensure a smooth transition to PC 1.0."
In addition to the announcement of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds leaving Early Access on Steam, the team behind the game also mentioned that the leaderboards would be reset with the change to the newly updated version. Naturally, some fans are going to be upset about that, but if they're determined enough, those players can always start clawing their way back to the top as soon as tonight's maintenance has ended.
Furthermore, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' 1.0 update will also bring about the ability to vault over objects and climb things in the environment, which ought to make getting around the map much easier than before. Not to mention, there's also going to be a new 3D killcam, new weapons and vehicles, and the desert map known as Miramar introduced to all players.
Taking all of this into consideration, it looks as if PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds fans on PC are getting a bountiful gift with a lot of new content to explore over the course of the holidays. Nevertheless, it's also important to keep in mind that there's no telling how well the game will run once its 1.0 update is applied. Of course, the development team will always have the chance to refine the experience should the 1.0 update's launch be rocky. After all, PUBG ran rather poorly when it released for Xbox One, but the studio has since provided a solid patch that fixes some visual issues and adds performance improvements.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is available now for PC and Xbox One.