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The test servers for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds will begin next week, developer Bluehole has announced. That will bring the long anticipated vaulting and mantling system to the game for the first time.

Vaulting and climbing means players will be able to traverse the map a lot more quickly, of course, and get to safety faster. In-game obstacles at scale heights of 2.3 meters can be mantled, Bluehole said. This means that obstacles at chest height or shorter may be scaled weapon-in-hand. Anything larger and the weapon will be holstered automatically.

Vaulting and climbing was announced back at E3 2017. The game has had jumping but using that to surmount obstacles has often been a frustrating and inelegant process. “Game changer” has been used by fans and observers to describe this new feature.

Bluehole followed this announcement with a peek at its newest map from Gamescom 2017, and unsurprisingly, it’s more vertical and more compact.

In addition to the vaulting and climbing, Bluehole announced a renewed effort to identify and deal with cheaters.

“For a very long time, our development team has been analyzing data from a large pool of users who show abnormal gameplay behavior to build a system that helps us positively identify cheaters,” the developer said. “We are now able to use the system to identify and ban these users more proactively. Using this system, we have already identified and banned about 20K additional users in only one day.”

Bluehole did not say when the 1.0 launch of the PC version was coming, but it’s still expected by the end of the year. The Xbox One version of the game, published by Microsoft and announced at E3 2017, is expected by then, too.

Source: Polygon