Many video games are being shown off this weekend at PAX South and PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is one of them. The game has received some alpha testing and when launched will feature 64-player last man standing matches on a remote island. If you need any more reason to be interested, Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene created the Battle Royale mod for Arma 2 & 3 plus Bluehole Studios are the makers of the MMORPG Tera.
We sat down with Brandon Greene himself at PAX South to discuss the game and its future.
GC: What were some of the inspirations behind PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS?
BG: I created Battle Royal based on the movie Battle Royal. I just loved that movie. I mean the Last Man Standing match was not my idea, it’s been around for years for as long as men could pick up sticks and fight. For BATTLEGROUNDS it’s a refinement of what I’ve been doing with mods for the last four years and I finally get to make its own standalone game.
GC: So far you have had two alphas with 3 updates. What kind of feedback have you received?
BG: Overwhelmingly positive! The guys at the company kinds go ‘It’s too positive’, but doing an open alpha like we did we got so much feedback and so much bug reports that you just wouldn’t get. So it’s been super helpful for us to do that and we intend to keep going with that. So during our beta we will do the same. We’ll have the servers up for the weekend, bug fix during the week, and then put them up again for the weekends.
GC: Will there be more alpha testing?
BG: In February we move from alpha to closed beta.
GC: Who’s idea was it to include a frying pan as a melee weapon?
BG: That was all me! I love it cause in the movie Battle Royale one of the girls gets a frying pan and I wanted to put in a frying pan as a tribute to Battle Royale.
GC: What kind of vehicles will we be seeing in the future?
BG: So we have a truck, like a big military truck. We also have a motorbike and a motorbike with a cycle. With a little thing about that is BikeMan who is a streamer, his dad met him at one of the conventions last year. He was really just a old biker dude, but he passed away late last year from cancer. So on our bike in the game the logo on the bike is the Charles Ronald Troubadour edition as a silhouette for his father. So he father is immortalized in the game. I mean the island itself is based off my daughter and it’s fun that we have the ability to do these kinds of things.
GC: How much of the world will we be able to interact with?
BG: Well it’s an open world so it’s an 8 x 8 map. We have underground areas. When it comes to the world it will be all open so it’s not like an RPG where you can interact with people like that, but the world is there to do whatever you want with it.
GC: Will this strictly be a multiplayer game?
BG: For the moment yes. I would love to put in a single-player campaign, but that is a whole year, two years worth of work.
GC: Where can we keep up withPLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS?
BG: We have a Twitter pubattlegrounds, and we have our website. We have dev blogs that are updated on a weekly basis and so is Twitter. Twitter is where we put out most of the stuff.
