For readers of Eurogamer, it may have been a while since you last read much in depth about PUBG – or indeed PUBG Battlegrounds (redundant subtitle duly acknowledged by publisher Krafton) as it’s now known in its post-Brendan Greene form. PUBG is now the brand, Battlegrounds the game, and specifically it’s the battle royale one we all played, often obsessively, in its early years.
Only now it’s not! Battlegrounds is getting a new PvE mode, entirely separate from battle royale, called Xeno Point. Technically this isn’t the first PvE mode in the game – a previous collaboration with Gen Z’s beloved viral sensation, Skibidi Toilet, was the first, along with various sort-of modes you could play involving bots – but in a sense Xeno Point feels the most significant take from PUBG on the genre so far.
It’s probably best to think of Xeno Point as a kind of standalone game within PUBG Battlegrounds. In it, you’ll squad up with three others and load into a futuristic hub, where you can expend resources to advance a large skill tree, upgrade special ultimate-style abilities, craft items, and select your gear for the round ahead. For older PUBG-heads that gear will be plenty familiar. It’s all the standard battle royale weapons, attachments, backpacks and the like, plus a special, slightly unspectacular anti-alien weapon for good measure. But the twist here is there are now multiple variants of said weapons, now colour-coded and ranked for rarity.
With those rankings come the usual looter-shooter trappings of various percentage buffs to damage dealt with certain weapons, or resisted by your armour – and so optimisation, in theory, will prove increasingly important as you ascend through the levels and difficulty tiers.
Just how important that’ll be, however, was hard to tell from my time with the game. On the third tier of four – albeit with a mix of epic and legendary gear, which might’ve been on the overpowered side – the first mission I played was a breeze. Almost excessively so; our group quickly scythed through a reimagining of the Miramar desert map in linear form, standing on capture points to defend against waves of enemies and taking down a sub-boss on the first attempt. After dipping out to the hub to re-spec quickly we then beat the main mission boss on first attempt too, and so upped the difficulty for a final round.
This proved tougher, but again ultimately quite manageable. How much of that was down to two of our team being PUBG studios developers themselves is naturally up for debate – I did my part! – and likewise, our high-level gear will be a factor too. One teammate did keep getting downed by the boss, and then repeatedly knocked back down again the moment they were revived (a classic, caused by the boss being able to target, lock-on, and charge up a big attack on players even as they crawl around waiting for a res) leading me to somewhat bluntly abandon them (sorry). But even then, the toughest battle on the toughest difficulty, with unoptimised gear and barely a glance at the skill tree, wasn’t a huge challenge.
In a way though, the challenge is moot – these are the sort of issues quickly patched once spotted by players, or probably, by now, already tinkered with multiple times before the mode’s launch. The main, lingering question for me is instead what this mode brings that’s really genuinely new, and whether it’s enough to really move the needle for PUBG players – lapsed or ongoing.
On that front, I’m still somewhat unconvinced. Xeno Point’s enemies – waves of either scuttling melee robo-spiders and self-destructing variants, or humanoid stand-and-shoot xeno-robots, or ones that give other ones an invincibility shield, or a boss that stands still and has several small, static weak points to shoot – are too repetitive and familiar to grab the attention. The map, too, suffers as a result. PUBG’s early maps are some of video games’ great places, eerie otherworlds with remarkably distinct sublocations that bed into the mind like the old shootout sets of classic Hollywood. Here, Miramar is essentially a loot funnel, sluicing you towards another piñata baddie at the end.
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All that said, like with just about every PvE mode, Xeno Point is a perfectly adequate time-killer for if your long-serving Battlegrounds friends want to mix it up a bit between rounds. It’s lighter and breezier, more directly attuned to casual moreishness and shorter session gaming, and so likely a serviceable palate cleanser between the extreme tension of battle royale itself. And it’s strangely nice, in a way, to be acquainted with my old weapons and attachments, and their specific PUBG idiosyncrasies, in a new form. But if I’m going back to PUBG – and convincing my friends to join me – it’s only Battlegrounds itself that’s going to do it.
This preview is based on a visit to Krafton and PUBG studios in Seoul, South Korea. Krafton provided flights and accomodation.
