Mobile renditions of massively popular shooters are in vogue, with titles like Call of Duty: Mobile adding content such as Modern Warfare 2's Highrise map regularly alongside additions to the mainline games. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds Mobile is doing the same, with developer Tencent announcing a new Nordic-style battle royale map to play on exclusively through the mobile platform.
This new map, called Livik, is smaller in scale. It's only 2km on all sides and supports 52 players for 15-minute match times, which makes it a "faster and more exciting experience" according to Tencent's Reddit post announcing PUBG Mobile's 0.19.0 update Monday. It also features exclusive weapons and a vehicle, the Monster Truck, with plans to add a special event featuring "Experimental Trial Weapon Crates" containing special weapons that have better stats sometime "soon."
Livik is not the only new content announced with Tencent's Reddit post. Following up on the Season 13 Royale Pass in May, updates to prepare for July 14's Season 14 Royale Pass are available now, and players who update before July 13th can get bonuses including a "Nightmare Helmet." A gameplay mode based on Season 14's theme, Spark the Flame, is also available in Classic Mode for the Erangel and Miramar maps.
On top of these and other upcoming additions, such as another themed mode called The Ancient Secret coming "soon" and changing availability times for modes like Payload, the Reddit update also discusses general game improvements like bug fixes and added achievements. Additions have also been made to PUBG Mobile's Guncraft feature, which lets fans totally customize their weapons.
PUBG Mobile is one of the more popular spin-off editions of shooter titles, which makes sense given its originator was one of the first successful titles in the battle royale genre. However, in June Call of Duty: Mobile passed 250 million downloads, which beat out PUBG Mobile's at-the-time 236 million.
That being said, the game's success has bore fruit for the studio in charge of developing the mobile port of PUBG. Members of the Tencent development team have gotten together with a former Rockstar Games employee to form Lightspeed Studio, which will create AAA next-generation games for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
Player Unknown's Battlegrounds Mobile is available now for Android and iOS.
Source: Reddit