Esports
Pro PUBG players give their hopes for a new map – and they might just be in luck, as the new look map revealed by Player Unknown at GDC seems to have some of their wishes.
Just over a year ago, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds entered our lives and changed them forever. We’ve sunk hundreds of hours into our quest for chicken dinners, and we regret none of it. The first map it launched with, Erangel, is now iconic and we all know every inch of it, from the Pochinki fields to Stalber Hill and the massive community of Georgopol; while the much newer Miramar map is slowly but surely establishing its key locations in the folklore of gaming.
Of course we now start to look towards the future and what new maps may hold. While we’ve racked up a few hundred hours in PUBG over the last year, the pro players have played for thousands. They’ve had a final circle across every inch of both maps multiple times, and know how to play every single position. With this much experience they’re the ones with perhaps the best suggestions for new maps – so we decided to ask the pros themselves what exactly they would want to see in a brand new map.
One of the most popular suggestions was less water than is seen on Erangel. The original map is made up of two islands, entirely surrounded by water, with a huge river running through the middle. In short, there’s a lot of water, and sitting in the sea doesn't make for entertaining viewing or playing.
Unfortunately for the pros, they aren’t in luck at present. The next PUBG map has been revealed in the last few weeks, and it’s once again an island map surrounded by water. In fact there appears to be three separate islands, separated by a fairly large river, so there’s still a lot of water to play with. When you add in the fact that this map is also only 4km x 4km and not 8km x 8km as the others were, this means there could be a lot of people who hide in the aquatic parts of the map.
However, the smaller size will please Team Vitality’s Matthieu ‘mOnKeY’ Ribiere, who specifically said he wanted a smaller map. What he was after was more of a deathmatch setting that would be all about fighting, to help players improve in this department. It seems that this map won’t quite offer that level of combat, but the smaller space will certainly lead to a lot more fights, and presumably, quicker matches.
There were some calls for an urban map that takes place entirely in a city, but that’s certainly not what we’ll be getting anytime soon. This new map seems to have more open landscape than ever, with very few major urban areas. It does seem to be littered with smaller compounds though, which will please Mathias ‘EnergeticTurtle’ Nielsen, who specifically said that he wanted to see maps broken up with more compounds.
When it comes to a specific location, pretty much nobody said 'a tropical island', which seems to be what we’ll be getting with the new smaller map. The most popular suggestion for a setting, however, was a snow map, which would certainly make for an interesting location, and one that the dev team has spoken about creating, at least for part of a map, before.
A snow map would change quite a bit. No longer would players be able to blend in with surroundings pretty easily, because it’s quite hard to blend in with snow unless you are kitted out in all white – and that will then leave you exposed against other scenery. It could also present other challenges such as vehicle use, and if it was a mountainous snowy setting, then the increased height changes would mean players have to be more aware of what’s going on above or below them.
While the new map doesn’t really seem to hit too many of the areas pros want to see, one thing it could do well is combining the best of Erengal and Miramar. Many pros said they want the layout and design of Erangel, but with the varied terrain from Miramar. It’s not easy to see based on the short look we got at the upcoming map, but this certainly seems like it could be a possibility.
Pro players may have to wait a while longer to get their urban snow map, but there’s no doubt that the PUBG Corp team is already hard at work at further new maps to keep things fresh. They’ll surely start to look at what the pros are asking for and start implementing those ideas further down the line. This new, upcoming smaller map may not be exactly what the pro players want, but it sure looks like it’ll change up almost everything we’ve become used to when playing PUBG. We can't wait to see it in action.
