Update, September 29: First-person perspective is coming to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Squad and Duos mode across Oceania, South America, and South-East Asia.
It’s taken a while, but it looks like it won’t be long until first-person persepective will be rolled out across more PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds modes in Australia, South America, and South-East Asia.
Check out our PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds guide.
A tweet posted by the offical PUBG account today confirms that “aftermid-October, we will open Squad FPP on OCE servers. Duo FPP will be open on SA and SEA servers.”
After mid-October, we will open Squad FPP on OCE servers. Duo FPP will be open on SA and SEA servers. Exact date to be announced in 2 weeks.
— PLAY BATTLEGROUNDS (@PUBATTLEGROUNDS) September 29, 2017
OCE servers already had FPP enabled for duos, but a lower-than-average player-count in the region meant that Bluehole were reluctant to add FPP to Squad. Previously, SA and SEA servers did not have FPP, for similar reasons.
The tweet doesn’t give us an date for the rollout, but I’d assume it’ll be ready by the end of October. The exact date will be announced in two weeks, on Friday, October 13.
Update, September 6:So it turns out that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds players in Oceania are getting first-person mode after all, despite the developers literally saying the exact opposite of that yesterday.
So yes, PUBG players from Australia are getting first-person mode, despite an (admittedly unofficial) announcement yesterday. In ablog postreleased yesterday, the game’s development team announced that first-person mode would be coming to duo matches on the OCE servers.
The post says the reason why OCE wasn’t getting first-person servers is that the game requires 500 people to be playing at once in order to account for two game modes, and at its low points in that region, the game was dropping below that.
But Bluehole realised that up to 20% of OCE’s players were playing on North American or Asian servers in order to get the first-person perspective they wanted. On those servers, they were obviously experiencing higher latency, so Bluehole hope that the change will bring these players back to their native servers, and will help the OCE community to grow as a whole.
The first-person mode for duo should be already be available now, as the post says it was due to go live at 15:30 ACST yesterday. According to the post, the plan is to provide first-person for solo and squad at some point in the future when it will have a lesser impact on the player experience as a whole.
Original story, September 5:Oceania won’t be getting first-person PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds servers for quite a while yet. A post in the continental Discord server for the survival game says that the number of people playing in the area is simply too small to warrant adding the new game mode.
In areas with higher player counts, including Europe and North America, FPP, or first-person perspective servers were added at the beginning of August. But while players on the OCE servers continued to request the mode, which exists alongside the standard third-person game mode, their appeals seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
That is, until today, when a post on the OCE PUBG Discord sever by the game’s lead community manager, Sammie Kang, said that while the team were “currently looking into a solution,” there were not enough players to let them add FPP.
Kang says “I’ve said it on Twitter but the truth is, current player base in OCE is too small for us to add another game mode.” This isn’t a decision the team have made lightly, as Kang says that “we actively monitor data from different servers and game modes on a regular basis.”
The worry remains, however, that adding a second game mode would split the player base. That would either drive the matchmaking times up, or lower the number of players in each game. Kang says that both of those outcomes could “result in negative player experience,” which is clearly something she’s keen to avoid.
You can read Kang’s full statement here, although beware that it’s unofficial – while solutions are still being looked into, it’s been difficult to make any official announcement.
The idea that PUBG would be struggling from a lack of players is almost baffling. Just yesterday, it was announced that the game would have more than a million concurrent players by the end of the week.