PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds will be finished in 6 months, but he has nothing but sympathy for the DayZ and H1Z1 teams
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds will not hang around Early Access for yonks, unlike other games we might mention and in fact already did.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has a strange history, growing up out of the DayZ mod for Arma 2, through H1Z1's King of the Kill mode, and finally going standalone to become one of the most successful debuts of 2017 so far.
Even though PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been a success, it has its doubters. Given its strong association with DayZ and H1Z1 and its release on Steam Early Access, that's not surprising: both of those games have been hanging around in Early Access for ages, and many of their supporters are right cheesed off - fairly or unfairly.
That's not going to happen to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the eponymous creator told Rock Paper Shotgun.
"People tell us we’re not going to be out of early access in six months; challenge accepted. I can guarantee you, six or seven months and we’re out of early access," he said.
"It’s the team. It’s a matter of honour, you know? We will finish this game in six months."
Despite promising the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds team will do what two more established developers could not, the former modder has nothing but love for Bohemia Interactive and Daybreak Games (formerly Sony Online Entertainment). He defended both, pointing out that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is built on the Unreal Engine, while both Bohemia and Daybreak are working with in-house tech.
"We work with Unreal, which is a joy because [Epic has] a company that is focused on making an engine. So there’s 40 people just working on code for the engine. You look at Daybreak and Bohemia, they’re working on their own engines, and that’s just infinitely harder," he said.
"I think the ForgeLight engine is a ten year old engine. Now, they’ve improved it considerably since then, but it’s the same with the Arma engine, it’s 15 years old. Now DayZ are making a new engine, and that’s just something which takes time.
"It’s something a lot of people don’t understand and they get a lot of hate because of that. I just try to correct them whenever I can. It’s like, listen, guys, they will get finished. Companies are not going to abandon games like that, you know? People say, ‘oh, DayZ will never be finished,’ and of course it will."
We can only hope. In the meantime, we're not above pointing out that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is getting bikes well before DayZ.
Have you had a go at PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds? If you're yet to take the plunge because you've been put off by the rough state of other early access games, it's worth dipping a toe.