Ahead of the launch of PUBG’s new Rondo map we spoke toPUBGIn-Game Production Director Taehyun Kim about new features and the future of the battle royale, which remains one of the most popular games on Steam, despite stiff competition.
Rondo is the largest map ever introduced to PUBG, a 8x8 battlefield that fuses ‘modern cityscapes’ with ‘traditional beauty’. It also introduces new features, such as destructible terrain, new vehicles, and weapons.
“We’ve added destructible bamboos, turntables, fireworks, birds and fish across the new map to provide a fun and refreshing experience,” Kim explains. It’s the first time that there’s been any kind of destructible terrain in PUBG, and the addition will herald a major change to battle royale’s gameplay.
Rondo’s size may be daunting, but players will be aided by the new Blanc, a vehicle that Kim says “shows similar performance to SUVs”, which has been designed to make this huge theatre of war more traversable.
We wondered if these new features - such as being able to destroy entire buildings or ruin parts of the map to enhance gameplay - would be added to older PUBG maps. Kim explains that it’s mostly down to player feedback. “We’re closely examining player feedback on the destructible bamboo trees and exploring the possibility of adding features like destructible entrances and hay bales,” he says. “Depending on the player response and feedback, we may incorporate these features into existing maps.”
On the topic of player feedback, PUBG now has ten maps in total, which is the most maps of any battle royale currently available - however, this many maps can lead to problems. Players actively complain about matchmaking and map rotation, and Kim explains why it’s tricky to allow map selection, “When considering traffic and individual MMR, it is difficult to provide the map selection option across all regions.” He also notes that PUBG Studios has already shortened the rotation time between maps, so that players “don’t have to wait that long to play the map of their choosing.”
But map rotation is still a major concern for the studio. “Rondo is already our tenth map and map rotation is a major topic our fans give us a lot of feedback on,” Kim says. “Rotating maps is an inevitable choice and we rotate them differently for different regions. We don’t keep new maps in the rotation pool just because they are new; decisions will be made based on player feedback. As for Rondo, we will fix it for the first two to three months after its release so players can freely try and get used to the new map.”
Rondo is the first new PUBG map in a year. It follows a pattern of annual releases of new maps for the game, so we asked Kim if this is a pattern that will continue in the future. “Of course,” he says, “we want to keep delivering new maps and new experiences to our players, but we can’t ever compromise on quality as the quantity increases. That’s at the heart of everything we do.”
While Rondo is a massive map, you can look forward to enjoying different areas of the map on a smaller-scale in the future, as Kim notes that the studio is “also planning to provide some locations of Rondo via the Intense Battle Royale and Team Deathmatch modes with future updates.”
