Brendan Greene on the backflip over Aussie PUBG first-person servers

In a recent chat with Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene, I tried to find out about the weird turnaround in relation to first-person servers here in Australia. Specifically, in a post in September, the Lead Community Manager for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds stated that the Oceania player base was too small to add extra game modes. After some outrage from the community, another blog post went up the very next day confirming that squad first person servers would be going live in a few hours.

Stevivor asked Greene about this backflip, and if it was in relation to Australian’s just being ‘whiny bastards’.

“Yeah you f*ckers never shut up man,” Greene joked. “Ever since Arma 3 you guys were looking for first person servers, or even servers in Australia for Battle Royale. I really tried but your servers are too f*cking expensive here. Like really, Jesus Christ. I can get ten servers in the United States for the price it costs for one here. But that’s what happens when you’re an island in the middle of f*cking nowhere.”

After apologizing on behalf of our terrible infrastructure situation here, Greene reassured me that first-person servers were always coming, and also that solo first-person is something they want to do in Australia.

“I mean we always had a plan to open up first person servers all over the world we just wanted to make that the service can support it, and now it can,” Greene said. “We want to open all of the modes up in all of the regions. But right now we are focused on getting the build and the servers stable. The more regions that we open the more maintenance that will be required, and we want to make sure that it is all stable before pushing it to everyone.”

With PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ 1.0 build on the way, Stevivor asked Greene about the state of the current map Erangel. Recently the map saw a change in the North-Eastern region with a town called Kameshki being added, along with a few other tweaks made to that area. So are they happy with how this turned out?

“We are seeing a bit more up the North, but people still tend not to go all that often,” Greene said. “We’re trying to sort of make the map still, and we’ll look at the map again maybe in a year – maybe redo it even more. It’s just about improving it, looking at areas which are underused and seeing if there is anything which we can do about it.”

“It’s about having the resources for improving one map though. But the new map we want to showcase in 1.0 at the end of the year. And we’ll be rolling it out to the test servers a little bit before that to let people test it and get a look at what it is. I’m genuinely excited for the new map because it’s such a different terrain that Battle Royale hasn’t really been fought on before. So far all the Battle Royale’s have been in these lush green areas. This is a much more hot and dry terrain so it’s going to be interesting.”

For more from Greene in regards to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, look below:

• Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene on PUBG’s latest update
• Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene on how vaulting will change PUBG
• Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene on PUBG’s success and Game of the Year
• Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene on cheating in PUBG
• Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene says PUBG is not “esports ready”

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available in early access on Windows PC. It launches on Xbox One on 12 December.