{"id":81721,"date":"2026-09-03T05:09:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T21:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=81721"},"modified":"2026-09-03T05:09:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T21:09:00","slug":"new-pubg-game-is-about-hijinks-and-a-beer-with-the-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=81721","title":{"rendered":"New PUBG Game Is About \u2018Hijinks\u2019 and \u2018A Beer With the Boys\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"


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During Gamescom 2026’s Opening Night Live showcase, Krafton revealed a brand-new game set in the same universe as PUBG<\/em>: Dednet<\/em>. It looked utterly bonkers. Set to Ministry\u2019s song \u201cJesus Built My Hotrod,\u201d <\/em>it featured a woman getting her face blown off before she could answer a ringing phone, a blazing truck almost running over a player with a light machine gun, three players sliding on their bellies down a grassy slope, another player replacing his arms with machete blades\u2026 the list goes on.<\/p>\n

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The thing is, apart from clearly being a balls-to-the-wall multiplayer FPS, when the trailer concluded, nobody was any the wiser about what it actually was<\/em>. Is it another battle royale? An arena shooter? An extraction shooter? The following day, I sat down with the game’s creative director, Dave Curd, a man who has worked at PUBG Studios for over nine years, to find out exactly what PUBG Dednet <\/em>is and why we should be excited.<\/p>\n

“This is a game about going on a run,” he told me (but thankfully not the exercise kind). “A run is a multi-match journey where between each match, you’re gathering strange, weird new abilities and mitigating funny injuries to make your dream build and become the king of killers.” The reason for this approach? He explained that Dednet <\/em>will allow the team to offer “pace and persistence,” two things that can’t be found in the classic PUBG <\/em>experience.<\/p>\n

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“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 <\/em>foundation of one game, totally fair, may the best man win.” In essence, PUBG Dednet <\/em>is a multiplayer FPS roguelite. Curd described roguelite mechanics to me as “the ultimate one more spicy chip seasoning that this genre desperately lacks.”<\/p>\n

Where PUBG <\/em>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<\/em>. 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<\/em>. But when it’s time to crack open a beer and play with the boys and get into some fucking hijinks? Yeah, Dednet <\/em>is gonna be your game.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But that’s exactly what Dednet <\/em>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 <\/em>matches start with the player waking up somewhere, and eventually they want 100 of these scenarios\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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