PUBG’s blue circle of death is getting a buff to its damage over time

Next week’s early access update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds will bring an often-requested change to the game with a buff to the blue zone’s damage over time.

One of PUBG’s defining gameplay characteristics is how the map shrinks as the dangerous blue zone closes in on a marked area of the map. This update will increase the damage that is done by the blue zone to try to keep fights inside the safe zone.

A common tactic used by some players in the late game is to stock up on healing items and shoot enemies in the back as they move into the safe zone. This change hopes to mitigate that sort of play.

“We have received a lot of feedback asking for improvement of the blue zone,” PUBG’s blog post said. “We have decided to adjust the blue zone damage to encourage engagement inside of the play zone. From this new update, you will be able to focus more on the immediate, close-ranged skirmishes inside the play zone, instead of dealing with enemies outside of the play zone during the mid to late phases of the game.”

In deploying this update, the PUBG team also announced that the test servers for the game’s big 1.0 release will begin in early November, and not late October as originally planned.

The first round of testing will be “a minimum of three days of extensive testing” of the game’s new vaulting and climbing features. After that will come a round of optimizations and bug fixes that will need to be tested, and three rounds of testing before 1.0 is deployed will conclude with a number of new features, including the highly-anticipated desert map.

These next few weeks will be crucial for PUBG’s development as the game heads towards an official release, and the team is hoping to see the test servers highly utilized when the time comes.