PUBG creator Brendan Greene said in June that vaulting, climbing, and diving would all be coming to the game, a plan that was firmed up a few months later when he said that the vaulting part, at least, was expected to go live in November. It turns out that he was pretty much dead-on with the estimate, as the PUBG team announced on Steam today that “we will be running the test servers for PC 1.0 for the first time next week,” giving players an opportunity to climb, vault, and test changes to driving, ballistics, and other “features and systems.”
“Crossing and scaling obstacles may intermittently create many new tactical options available to the players. The standard jump feature can be used in standard situations, but there are many areas where it does not suffice. After all, PUBG features a play area of considerable proportions. In addition, objects located on the map differ greatly in shape and size,” the developers wrote. “Such complexity can cause many problems for the players who need to rely on fast and effective means of jumping over (or on top of) boxes, containers, fences etc. For that reason we have decided to implement dynamic vaulting and climbing mechanics.”
The initial plan was to enable climbing objects of up to one meter in height, but that was eventually increased to a height limit of roughly 2.3 meters. Almost anything can be climbed as long as the height is right; players will be able to climb chest-high objects with a weapon in hand, while those that are higher will require two hands, so your weapon will automatically be holstered before you start to ascend.
Predictably, implementing the new system will be a complex undertaking. The post digs into the technical elements a little, but the bottom line is that it will probably be a rocky road to start with. “Due to the nature of this system, we expect possible issues, bugs and problems to occur,” the PUBG team said. “Ironing out this feature may take some more time, but we do hope you will have a lot of fun with it and make great use of it. We are eagerly awaiting your feedback and reports.”
The developers also promised ongoing efforts against PUBG cheaters, including “new measures to better identify and track” the people who play unfairly.
“For a very long time, our development team has been analyzing data from a large pool of users who show abnormal gameplay behavior to build a system that helps us positively identify cheaters. We are now able to use the system to identify and ban these users more proactively. Using this system, we have already identified and banned about 20K additional users in only one day,” the message says.
“This is only a start. On top of BattlEye, we will use a monitoring system to strengthen our efforts to prevent use of cheats and impose penalties on them. We promise you that we will continue to do our best to quickly find and ban people who use cheats. We hope you will start to see an improvement going forward.”
One thing that isn’t coming, however, is a single-player campaign: Greene confirmed with Gamespot at PAX Australia that despite wanting to do it, there’s no time, no resources, and “no plans to add anything like this to the game. No single-player is coming to Battlegrounds.”