PUBG Servers Going Down For 7 Hour Maintenance Ahead Of PC 1.0 Release

After nine months of being available in Early Access, the massively popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds finally launches in full for PC today, December 20. PUBG's servers will be taken offline for maintenance ahead of the game's 1.0 release, and now publisher Bluehole has confirmed they'll be down for a little longer than expected.

On Twitter today, the official PUBG account announced that server maintenance will begin at 4 PM PT / 7 PM ET (1AM CET on December 21)--two hours earlier than it was originally supposed to. However, the maintenance period is still scheduled to conclude at 11 PM PT, so PUBG 1.0 is still slated to release later tonight, as initially planned. The tweet says this extended maintenance period is "to ensure a successful and smooth launch."

In a separate tweet, the PUBG Twitter account also confirmed that the game's test servers will be taken offline when live servers go into maintenance, so players will be unable to play PUBG at all on PC for a full seven hours tonight before its 1.0 release. The tweet explains this is "to ensure a smooth transition to PC 1.0." Similarly, PUBG's leaderboards were recently wiped in preparation for the game's full release.

PUBG 1.0 will feature a number of new mechanics, most notably climbing and vaulting. PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, says these two features "will change the game severely." Additionally, players will be able to play on a new desert map called Miramar, which was recently available to try on PUBG's test servers. Players will find new types of obstacles, weapons, and vehicles in Miramar that will affect how you approach the game.

While PUBG will be unplayable on PC for a large chunk of the day due to this extended maintenance period, players will still be able to jump into the game on Xbox One. That version received its first patch earlier this week, which made "first pass" improvements to its visuals and performance and squashed a number of bugs.