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Battlegrounds represents the standalone version of what Greene believes is the "final version" of the battle royale concept, incorporating the elements he had designed in previous iterations. Faster development was possible with the game engine Unreal Engine 4, compared with ARMA and H1Z1, which were built with proprietary game engines. Greene acknowledged that implementing the size of the maps in Battlegrounds has been one of the challenges with working with Unreal, which was not designed with such maps in mind. The game was designed as a mix between the realistic simulation of ARMA 3 and the arcade-like action focus and player accessibility of H1Z1.Based on Greene's experience with the genre, an island with many terrain features was picked as the first map, known as "Erangel". The map design scope was to offer players many possible options for strategic and unique gameplay. Some buildings and structures were designed to depict the style of the brutalist architecture of the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The developer team playtested architecture features and random item placement systems, looking at both how close-quarters encounters went, and for open terrain areas. The goal was to optimize the right distribution and placement of weapons and gear across the map, to encourage players to make strategic decisions about how to proceed in the game without overly penalizing players who may not find weapons within the first few minutes of a round. During early access, additional maps were planned, such as one set on a fictional island in the Adriatic Sea that included snow-covered Yugoslavian territories. Greene stated that he thought the Erangel map felt disjointed despite meeting their goals for gameplay, and sought to create more unified ideas with future maps.The freefall from an airplane at the start of each match was a new feature for the genre, to encourage strategy between staying with the pack of players or seeking out one's own route for a better chance at finding good loot. With the added parachute drop, Greene considered that Battlegrounds had three distinct subgames: the airdrop during which one must quickly figure out the best time to jump and where to land in relationship to the other players, the loot game of knowing where and how to gather the best possible equipment, and the combat game with other players. Players who win a match are greeted with the phrase "winner winner chicken dinner", an idiom that Greene had used in his prior battle royale games and kept in Battlegrounds, which itself had origins as early as the Great Depression.Features that Greene anticipates adding include custom games and modding support. He considered modding support an essential part of the full release as, just as he had his start with mods, he wants to enable others to create variations on his game so that he can "find the next PlayerUnknown". Greene also wants to incorporate the game with streaming services like Twitch.tv that would enable replays or other features amenable to treating Battlegrounds as an eSport. Greene had anticipated that Battlegrounds would develop into an eSport, and this was an ultimate end goal for his development, but he wanted to let the nature of how it would play out as an eSport grow naturally with the player community. He also plans to introduce microtransactions to allow players to use real-world funds to purchase loot crates that provide randomly-selected cosmetic items, also known as "skins", which they can trade with other players; while Greene recognizes the issue with skin gambling, he believes that Valve has put safeguards in place to support a "skin economy" that will provide further revenue for them without concerns over gambling. However, by November 2017, gray market skin gambling sites began to appear, using Battlegrounds cosmetics as virtual currency. Following controversy over the use of loot boxes to offer "pay-to-win" items in other games in November 2017, the PUBG Corporation affirmed that while they will continue to add new cosmetic items rewarded by in-game crate purchases, they "will never add anything that affects the gameplay". In May 2018, PUBG Corporation disabled the ability to trade skins on the Steam Marketplace as they found that players were still abusing the system by selling them for monetary value through unofficial third-party platforms.While in early access, Bluehole offered an early preview of the system by offering time-limited crates that could be purchased during the first Battlegrounds Invitations tournament during Gamescom in August 2017, with the sales from these contributing to the prize pool. Among loot from these crates are special outfits inspired by the Battle Royale movie. Greene anticipates adding a campaign mode with co-operative player support, though there would be "no serious lore" crafted for the narrative, comparing this to similar modes in Watch Dogs.The game, while in early access, has already received alternate gameplay modes created by players, determined by unenforceable rules that players agree to abide by, that have been popular with streamers. This was aided by a quiet release of custom server support to a number of influential streamers which subsequently made it into public release. In one case, "Zombie Mode", all but four players pretend to be zombies, who may sometimes distinguish themselves by removing all clothing and are limited only to collecting melee weapons and consumable items, and must rush to attack the other four players, who are able to collect all gear and attempt to outrun and defeat the zombies. Inspired by this mode, Greene announced plans to introduce an official zombie-based gameplay mode based on this into Battlegrounds. Whereas most of the rest of the team continued to develop the core gameplay and maps, Greene is taking on the zombie mode as a near solo project, only using the assistance of the lead animator to help with the zombie animations. Greene sees Battlegrounds as a platform, and would like to see more custom game types and mods developed by players for it. Greene identified that some mods that he also previously worked on from ARMA 3 may become part of the Battlegrounds platform.To prevent in-game cheating, the game uses the "BattlEye" anti-cheating software, which was banning more than 6,000 players a day in October 2017 and over 2.5 million players in total by the beginning of 2018, with over a million in January alone. In December 2017, BattlEye indicated that 99% of cheats were made in China.


Release


Windows
Bluehole used closed alpha and beta periods with about 80,000 players, including popular Twitch streamers, to gauge initial reaction to the gameplay and adjust balance prior to a wider release. Just prior to the early access phase on Steam, Bluehole opened a few servers and invited some of the top streamers of the battle royale genre to try it out as to start gaining interest. Early access launched on March 23, 2017 for the Windows version. This early access period was planned to last approximately six months, originally aiming for a September 2017 release. In July 2017, Greene announced that they would need to extend the early access period by a few months, continuing to release updates on a regular basis, with plans to still release by the end of 2017, as committing to this original period "could hinder us from delivering a fully featured game and/or lead to disappointment within the community if the launch deadline is not met". Initially, Bluehole had expected that they would just gain enough players through early access to smooth out the gameplay, and only when the game was completed, they would have started more marketing for the title. The sudden interest in the game from early access exceeded their expectations, and put emphasis on the stability of the game and its underlying networking alongside gameplay improvements. Through August 2017, these updates generally included a major weekly patch alongside major monthly updates that provided key performance improvements. However, from August onward Bluehole backed off the rate of such patches, as the high frequency has led to some quality control issues, and the developers rather make sure each patch content is well-vetted by the community before providing new updates; this did not change their plans for a 2017 release, where it fully released out of early access on December 20.In part of the game's success in early access, Tencent Games, the largest publisher of video games in China, approached Bluehole that same month with an offer to publish Battlegrounds in China and purchase equity in the company. However, the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association issued a statement in October 2017 that discouraged battle royale-style games, stating that they are too violent and deviate from Chinese values of socialism, deeming it harmful to young consumers. The following month however, PUBG had reached a formal agreement with the Chinese government to allow the release of the game in the country, with Tencent as the publishing partner. However, some changes were made to make sure it aligned with socialist values and traditional Chinese morals. In South Korea, the game is marketed and distributed by Kakao Games.Despite the lack of a Chinese publisher prior to the Tencent deal, players in China had found ways to acquire and play the game through Steam via proxies and other networking tricks. The large Chinese player base had led to some technical and community problems with the game. From a technical standpoint, while PUBG Corporation offers various servers in different geographic regions, they have not used region locking, thus allowing players from disparate regions playing in the same matches. The network latency has caused issued in-game that make some characters "rubber band", appearing to be moving to one location before network synchronization that causes them to snap back to a different position. With the game out of early access, PUBG Corporation seeks to eliminate this effect to make this rubber banding less pronounced. To address the technical problems, PUBG Corporation plans to add maximum client ping limits for servers which can reduce the issues with latency problems and prevent some of the cheating that has occurred. This would not prevent cross-region matchmaking but may make it difficult for some players to play outside their region if they have a poor Internet infrastructure. Tencent has also helped by identifying and reporting around 30 software programs to Chinese police that can be used to cheat in Battlegrounds, leading to over a hundred arrests by the beginning of 2018. Separately, this technical issue, in addition to the larger number of Chinese players, has created complaints in the player community. Some Western players fear that many Chinese players are able to cheat in the game by exploiting some of the network latency issues, something that PUBG Corporation continued to address as the game shifted out of early access. However, a small number of players called for server segregation by region, and had used racial insults at Chinese players they encounter in game. Greene was disappointed with this "xenophobic attitude", calling it "disgraceful", and asked the player community to respect the Chinese players more as their numbers were a key part of the game's success. Greene also identified that players can easily get around such region locks using virtual private networks, making this approach ineffective.