PUBG’s blue zone is getting slower, but more deadly

The Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds team is working on the game’s combat, and one of its first steps is rebalancing the blue zone that keeps players in one area for their gunfights.

“Over the course of the Early Access period, we received a lot of feedback from you that the pacing and distribution of combat encounters in a match could be more even and less chaotic,” the official post states. “We performed a series of internal tests to find ways to address this issue. However, we were not able to take any action until now as other fundamental systems had to be developed and fixed first.”

The team may adjust them after getting feedback from players who try it, but here are the initial changes coming to the test server on the PC version of the game:

• Slightly decreased waiting time of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase of a match
• Slightly decreased shrinking speed of the blue zones in mid-to-late phase (In this phase, blue zones will now move at a slower speed and the travel time of blue zones has slightly increased due to this change)
• Slightly increased damage per second of the last blue zone

These are interesting fixes, in that it will be a bit easier to escape the blue zone as the enclosed space begin to moves faster while the match progresses. But if you find yourself on the wrong side of the wall in the map’s later stages, you may take more damage.

The goal seems to be to have fewer deaths caused by the wall wall and more deaths at the hands of other players, but that last blue zone is going to get very scary very quickly. The increased urgency the zone inspires in players is going to be quite a thing to see.