Bluehole Studios via SideArms4Reason/YouTube
- The biggest game of 2017, “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” is heading to consoles.
- It’ll arrive on the Xbox One first, on December 12.
- The PC version is still on track to reach “1.0” by the end of 2017.
Forget about Super Mario — the biggest game of 2017 is “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” the insane 100-player fight to the death that’s already pulled in tens of millions of players on PC.
And on December 12, “Battlegrounds” is finally heading to the Xbox One as a “console exclusive” game. That means it’s only available to play on the Xbox One — a PlayStation 4 version is expected down the line, but nothing official has been announced.
Xbox
Like the PC version of “Battlegrounds” — which first arrived back in March and has subsequently taken over the world of PC gaming — the Xbox One version of “Battlegrounds” will launch in an unfinished form, for $ 30. It arrives as a part of the Xbox “Game Preview” program, which allows game developers to start selling a game that’s still in development to players who will accept the risk of playing an incomplete game.
“Battlegrounds” originally launched on Steam’s “Early Access” program, which is similar to the Xbox Game Preview program. Developers post a game for sale, and Steam users can buy it knowing they’re at risk of encountering technical issues (or a game never being completed by its developer). The PC version of “Battlegrounds,” Greene told us in a recent interview, is still on track for reaching “1.0” by the end of 2017.
The Xbox One version, however, has a different trajectory — Greene and his employer, South Korean game company Bluehole, don’t have a planned date to reach 1.0 on the Xbox One just yet. The plan, they said, is for both the PC and Xbox One versions of “Battlegrounds” to be identical, and for players to compete across both platforms. There isn’t a stated window for when the game might reach that stage.
Microsoft/Bluehole
Both the Xbox One and PC versions of “Battlegrounds” are getting one feature this year that fans have been waiting on: vaulting.
It may sound trivial if you’re not one of the tens of millions of people playing “Battlegrounds” already, but the ability to vault over short objects in-game is a crucial addition that players have been clamoring for. If nothing else, that feature is planned for both versions of “Battlegrounds” this year.
“PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” will cost $ 30 on Xbox One, the same price listed on Steam for PC users. It arrives, via Xbox Game Preview, for Xbox One on December 12.
