PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the wildly popular multiplayer free-for-all, has seen explosive growth since it burst onto the scene a little over a year ago. With millions of new players every month, there’s also been a dramatic influx of cheaters, and the devs have announced a drastic measure to make the Battle Royale fair and more enjoyable for everyone.
After analyzing the data from 10 million players, PUBG Corp announced that it has identified a new pattern of cheats being used during the games. Retribution will be swift in the form of a virtual tsumani, the developers said in a blog post. “Through this exercise, we were able to identify over 100,000 instances of the new pattern related to use of cheat and now we have confirmed that it was clearly an attempt of compromising our game,” they wrote. “These players will be permanently banned in a single wave.”
This is all part of an ongoing effort that may involve filtering hundreds of billions of data logs manually. The developers also hope to implement a new system to detect and ban more cheaters proactively, and legal actions may be taken against those who proliferate software designed to circumvent security procedures.
They also pointed out an issue that many gamers have raised when viewing videos from other players. Although it may appear that a cheat is being used because there’s no weapon recoil, that’s actually a bug in the game software, and will be fixed soon.
A gameplay update is also planned to make gunfights less chaotic by balancing the blue-zone boundaries during matches. It will probably be easier to escape the blue zone in the late phase of the matches, but blue zones will cause more damage when you get trapped in them.
As Polygon notes, this seems to be an effort to encourage more deaths by gunfire from other players and fewer by the boundary wall. It will also add some urgency to the late game, as the blue zone encroaches near the end of a match.
Although its launch was rather rocky, PUBG is also now available on Xbox One through the Preview program, and many new Xbox players got it free with their console over the holidays. A new Xbox One patch was also just released, which adds a new controller options and fixes some performance issues.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.