PUBG's Parent Company Is Making A Strategy Game

Krafton is working on a new top-down strategy game, Thunder Tier One, as announced at The Game Awards on Thursday. Set in the '90s, players will jump between different missions that include a variety of combat scenarios and operators.

Thunder Tier One is a real-time strategy game with single-player, cooperative, and competitive multiplayer modes. There will be a Steam gameplay preview hosted from December 10 at 8 PM PT / 11 PM ET that will run through the morning of December 13. Developer PUBG Studio didn't specify a release date or window for the game.

Pawel Smolewski, an animation and gameplay lead at PUBG Corp before it merged with Krafton, is leading the project. He pitched the game in 2019 after originally starting the project in 2016. The studio ran an alpha for their game in October.

"In the early stages, our aim was to develop a prototype of a game that would be a base for future campaigns," Smolewski said, adding that the project started when he worked on ARMA 3 at Bohemia Interactive. "We also wanted it to have the potential to be modded by other users. After all, we had come from a modding background and we all worked on a highly moddable game."

Smolewski and the studio hope that players will embrace the game and create their own mods, which the studio plans to support once the game launches.

Krafton is both a developer and parent company of a number of studios, including PUBG Studio, Bluehole, and others. The company opened a studio in California in 2019 called Striking Distance with Glen Schofield, the co-founder of Call of Duty developer Sledgehammer Games, as CEO. Striking Distance is working on narrative-driven games based on PUBG.

Brendan Greene, the modder that created the original concept for PlayerUnkown's Battlegrounds, announced his latest project, Prologue, at last years' awards show. He's working on it with his team at PUBG Productions, a different subsidiary of Krafton.