New PUBG Game Is About ‘Hijinks’ and ‘A Beer With the Boys’

“What I mean by pace is the animation and gunplay, the movement, the traversal, the frequency of encounters, the minimalization of downtime kind of turned up to 11. And then the persistence totally breaks PUBG’s foundation of one game, totally fair, may the best man win.” In essence, PUBG Dednet is a multiplayer FPS roguelite. Curd described roguelite mechanics to me as “the ultimate one more spicy chip seasoning that this genre desperately lacks.”

Where PUBG might see you go on a losing streak and result in you calling it a night, Curd explains that “every match, win or lose, you’re moving your character forward” in Dednet. And he thinks the two can exist in harmony: “When I want something slow, deliberate, tactical, am I the smartest shooter? You’re not gonna do better than PUBG. But when it’s time to crack open a beer and play with the boys and get into some fucking hijinks? Yeah, Dednet is gonna be your game.”

Those hijinks certainly sound entertaining, too. Curd explained that you can turn into a “little baby doll with a drill arm” then hide in a locker, biding your time, or as seen in the trailer, you can chop your own arms off and replace them with machete blades. And if you combine the latter with the ability to snake through the grass, alongside an ability called “peekaboo” which allows you to see enemy outlines through walls (and vice versa, to stop it from being ridiculously overpowered), that’s the most meta build in the team’s early playtests. You become “some asshole on the ground with blades, sliding all over the place,” and it sounds like he’s both impressed at its ridiculousness and tired of its prevalence.

But that’s exactly what Dednet is going for; everything is over the top. Even the way matches begin is wacky. The team has a system called “wake 100,” because PUBG Dednet matches start with the player waking up somewhere, and eventually they want 100 of these scenarios… The only problem is, they’ve only got about five right now, Curd said with a laugh. Examples include waking up in a body bag, being dropped from a helicopter, being in a box at the bottom of a lake, that sort of thing.

He described it as a “tactical infil,” though, because these aren’t random. You can choose your spawn location, right up until the match starts, and you can also see where everyone else is picking. So you can hot drop by choice, knowing how many players you’ll have to contend with right from the get-go. Alternatively, you can go somewhere by yourself and loot up in peace.

This element is where Dednet sounds very battle royale-adjacent, and makes me wonder why seemingly splitting the PUBG player base is a smart move. This isn’t the only PUBG universe game in the works: Black Budget is another FPS that has had some public playtests, but that is an out-and-out extraction shooter, so will bring in a different audience. There was also Blindspot, a tactical shooter that launched in February of this year into Steam Early Access, then shut down after less than two months.

Unlike the studio’s other games though, Dednet has a story to it. The bright, bold outfits seen in the trailer aren’t just skins, they’re unique characters. And while each character can mix-and-match abilities — this isn’t a hero shooter — they have their own personal quests and connections to one another, including alliances and rivalries. Curd explained the characters are his take on “grindhouse films, too much Tarantino, and too much Italian zombie horror.” He describes it as a “very cohesive story with larger-than-life characters.”

Dednet has been in development for over two years, and Curd says the team is ready to “go a little bit larger and get more feedback” in the way of public playtests. If you want to be the first to find out more, you can register on the official PUBG Dednet site.