PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is getting a level select, presumably so everyone can avoid playing on Miramar. The option will come to the test server soon, allowing players to choose exactly where they get to blow each other up.
In a Steam Community post today, PUBG developers announced that a level select will come to the game. A toggle will let players select which maps they want to play on. The game has slowly expanded and added new battlegrounds over the last year, such as the massive desert map of Miramar and ‘Savage,’ which is currently in testing on an experimental server. Player opinion on Miramar has always been split, with some going as far as deleting the map’s files from the game in order to avoid playing on it. It led many players to ask for map selection.
“Map selection is something that players all over the world have continuously asked for,” the developers said. “We take your feedback extremely seriously, but we also want to be thoughtful about how we implement changes to PUBG. And we knew that map selection posed a couple of problems we needed to seriously consider.”
Among those concerns is worry that map selection and new game modes could partition the community, something particularly troublesome when matches require so many players. In addition to new maps, PUBG recently implemented limited time events ranging from a mode with supply drop-summoning flare guns and a hectic deathmatch mode. Giving players tools to play on their own terms is useful, but it might fragment a community that’s struggled to hold strong in the face of competitors like Fortnite Battle Royale.
“We analyzed tens of millions of matches and sorted the data by server, mode, and time to make sure map selection wouldn’t break the game for anyone,” the announcement post reads. “We wanted to make sure that we could create a solution that worked for every region’s players, even the ones with a naturally low server population.”
Map select will be implemented on PUBG’s test server “soon.”