Fumbled weapons, fake ragdolling and Wu-Tang: PUBG DED NET’s director explains how it thrives on chaos

For nearly 10 years, PUBG: Battlegrounds (previously PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) has remained steadfastly among the most widely played games on Steam.

According to SteamDB data, the game’s peak monthly concurrent player count has never dropped below 340,000 since its release in late 2017, and is usually much higher than that – in the past three months, it only dropped below a peak of 700,000 on two separate days.

The decision from publisher Krafton to announce a new PUBG spin-off game, then, is an extremely interesting one, not least because it takes things in an entirely different direction.

The announce trailer for the game – which is called PUBG DED.NET – was shown during Gamescom‘s Opening Night Live presentation, and was suitably anarchic, with loud music, comedy set pieces and all manner of over-the-top characters.

Given that PUBG is something of a strategic affair, where tactical decision-making and positioning are often more successful than pure reflexes, DED.NET is certainly a tonal shift, so I was keen to know more about it.

This week at Gamescom I sat down with the game’s creative director Dave Curd to talk more about the decision to make a new PUBG game, and how its more over-the-top presentation hopes to bring in a new audience of players – especially those on console – who may not otherwise be interested in the series.

VGC: Let’s start with the most obvious question – what differentiates DED.NET from PUBG?

DAVE CURD: I would describe DED.NET as a mid ‘90s nightmare, as me trying to spread the good word of PUBG to non-believers.

You know, we have an incredible base, we’ve had fans for the last 9½, 10 years. But I think PUBG is not just a blue circle or a level 3 helmet. It’s desperate survival, it’s a dark sense of humor, it’s dog-eat-dog. I think you could make a cool PUBG match-3.

I wanted to make my version of PUBG, that could reach maybe more of a console-friendly, broader audience, where we challenge the player to take a multi-match journey.

It’s a roguelike, and between each match you’re gaining valuable new abilities, you’re mitigating hilarious and strange injuries in pursuit of your favorite build to become the king of killers, where you’ve got to try to get as good as you can before you can win the chicken dinner or burn out trying. So yeah, that’d be my 10 second pitch on what we’re trying to do.

With a lot of live service games it can be difficult for new players to jump on, especially if a game’s been around for a long time like PUBG has. Is DED.NET also an attempt to bring aboard new players who may not be willing to jump onto PUBG because they’d be joining a decade in?

It’s funny, I thought the same thing. I think around year four, year five, we were really having a hard time bringing new people in. But we really refreshed the game to get free-to-play and weirdly PUBG is just like still cruising, it’s awesome.

But we’re in PUBG Madison, which is in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve been in games for 20 years working on things like the Call of Duty franchise, and I love making console games. And when I would go to the mall in my old Call of Duty days – which was a long time ago because there were still malls – I’d have dev gear on and guys would be like “oh shit, Call of Duty, what’s up?” But when I would have PUBG swag on in the States, you don’t get stopped as much.

There’s a lot of great, smart gamers that maybe don’t want to connect with the strategic, thoughtful, cerebral pace of PUBG, so our pitch was “let’s get something for them”.

But I think it would be crazy just to do something with snappier gunplay or just leaner or more athletic gunplay and traversal. I thought: “Well, what keeps me going back?” When I play any game with hot drops, no matter the competition, if I drop and die two or three times in a row real fast, it’s very easy for me to say “okay boys, it’s time to go to bed”.

But what if your story could last multiple matches, where win or lose, death is not the end, but you might hot drop, you might get smoked, but in the outgame were offered: “Hey, do you want a boombox that you can play Wu-Tang Clan and heal your party? Do you want to be able to hide in lockers, like a creep, and wait for someone to come by and stab them?”

We can offer you these abilities, where even if you’re having a bad night, you feel good because your character’s advancing, and you’re like, “oh shit, maybe one more game, because now my build’s coming along”. So when we had that thought, it felt fresh and different enough from PUBG to deserve to be its own thing, and they supported us to take a big swing.

“There’s a lot of great, smart gamers that maybe don’t want to connect with the strategic, thoughtful, cerebral pace of PUBG, so our pitch was ‘let’s get something for them’.”

What does a typical DED.NET session look like, then, from me booting up the game until the end of the run?

So, you would start by selecting a character from our initial roster of nine. These are not custom characters, these are actual characters with motivations, relationships with each other, relationships with the map, they will comment on shit all the time. If you take them to a POI that resonates with them they will chat about it, if they ping an ally or ping a rival they will have different responses.

You pick a character that you like the look of, that you think is cool, and you’re immediately offered three initial choices, and you can imagine that’d be something like: “Do you feel like doing an assault-esque build, maybe a support kind of build, or maybe a really trolly, trickster build?” And that’s just your baseline for the first game, that’s you making your commitment to the game that “I think this is what I want to be when I grow up”.

The only thing you need to know about a run is it’s basically a wager, or a goal, or a challenge. Can I go five matches before I run out of run health, run HP – we need to figure out what to call that because it’s not sexy – but just imagine, if I’m winning a lot, my run HP stays high. If I’m always first out, I could burn out before I can complete that five, six, seven-game challenge.

So you’re like “okay, I wanna be a support guy, let’s do it”. I hit the button, into the match – the first thing that’s different is we’re not doing the airplane. One of the first sacred calves is ‘thou must have an airplane’. We’re not doing that. We’re gonna give you the map, and you and your squad are gonna drop a pin and say “hey, maybe we want to go to the mall”.

But what’s interesting is the other 57 players are also pointing where they want to drop. And as the time is ticking down, more guys are going to drop on your spot. And you’re going to decide: “Do I bluff? Aat the last second, do we go out in the woods instead? Do we say ‘fuck you, this is my POI, we’re going to fight’?” So it’s just a little bit of a mini-game before you get in.

And then when you get in, you could wake up in a body bag, you could get kicked out of a helicopter, You could wake up in a chest in the bottom of the lake. And it’s “where am I, what’s going on, it’s time to fight”. You get in there and now you’re into the familiar Battle Royale tropes – you know, a shrinking circle, your trios, your squad. It’s for trios with 60 people.

This map would be five and a half kilometers square, but the first circle, the first phase, is always like two and a half. So you never get the same exact map twice. So you might love Mall, but maybe in your next game, you’re over here. So you jump in, you fight. For this scenario, we’ll say, you made it about halfway into the game before they finally took you out, and you go to the outgame.

You’ve lost a little bit of run health because you didn’t win, but you didn’t totally lose, so we just shave a little bit down and we offer you three things. We offer you another ability in that core fantasy of… I think we said Support? So we might say: “Oh, hey, do you want to try Car Door Riot Shield?”

Then we offer you something from really outside your core fantasy, like maybe some from the Trickster path. “Hey, do you want to play dead? Do you just want to ragdoll and appear to be a corpse, and if anyone leads to you, you’ll go flashbang, and you can stab them in the face?” And then we’ll offer kind of a wildcard, like, who knows what it is. And say you’re kind of deciding “well, I’ll keep going Support” for now.

“Then we offer you something from really outside your core fantasy, like maybe some from the Trickster path. ‘Hey, do you want to play dead? Do you just want to ragdoll and appear to be a corpse, and if anyone leads to you, you’ll go flashbang, and you can stab them in the face?'”

Now we’re a couple of games in, you’re about halfway through your run, you’re on match three. Again, you finished about the middle of the pack, you’re off to the outgame. Now we’re starting to offer injuries with the powers, and you have to take it. So now you’re like: “Oh, Akimbo, I’d love to use two shotguns, but it comes with ‘hurts when I swim’. Oh, that’s going to suck. What if it’s a water circle?”

Or you might get Bloody Eyes, which is one of my favourites, which lets you mark and identify targets super far away, but it comes with the funniest, trolliest injury, which is Weapon Fumble, where there’s a very small chance on weapon swap that you’ll just send it sailing. Character will swear, character will be mad, you’ve got to go pick up your gun. It’s very funny, very frustrating.

So by the end, by the time you’ve finally made it to that game five, we’re offering lots of injuries, we’re really starting to push you to your limit.

Because what I neglected to tell you – so I’m glad this is being transcribed! – is that within a single match, essentially in phase one, when you choose that Support run you’re gonna get a deck of Support-style abilities. You’re not gonna get five, you’re gonna get like seven or eight, so you don’t know exactly what you’ll get.

In the very first phase, two abilities come up from your deck – [and you choose] this one or this one. And phase two, now you’ve got two powers. Phase three, now you’ve got three powers. So by five phases everybody has five abilities unlocked.

Deeper in your run, in that last game, just through luck of the draw, you might just have two injuries pop up. You’re like: “Okay, now I gotta decide, do I sneeze in the smoke, or do I have a nervous tic where I taunt all the time, uncontrollably?” And you’ve got to pick that.

I think PUBG is the ultimate storytelling engine, and so we thought, can a story last multiple matches? And then can we make the world more more interactable and more strange and funny to provide a wider spectrum of potential stories?

So if the abilities are more tied to the type of role the player chooses for that run, does that mean the nine playable characters don’t have unique abilities, and that the character you choose will be more of a cosmetic decision?

Yeah, one of the lessons we took was it’s so tempting – especially when you see these characters – to be like “okay, I have them pegged with what they would come with”. But then you run into this problem that players always chase what they perceive to be the strongest builds, and they may choose characters that they don’t even like because maybe they have the ability that they think is best.

So we really wanted to divorce ability chase from characters, so that you pick the character that you think is coolest, or you want to see how their story goes. But then, as you’re building these abilities, another thing we were really conscious of is that it should never be stacking powers. Like, you know, 10% heat damage. Because I don’t think that’s what the fans want, they don’t want to lose to a magic bullet.

All of our abilities are gameplay situations, just new tactics that you couldn’t do before, whether it’s hiding, deceiving, supporting, spotting, kicking in doors, wielding multiple weapons. It’s all almost like ‘make your own hero shooter’, ‘build your dream operator’. But because it’s rogue, you never always get exactly what you want. If we let players get exactly what they want, we’ve just made perks but worse.

So I think the beauty and the charm of the game is starting Support, then kind of veering into Troll, and then veering to Assault, and ending up with this kind of marvelous mutant by the end.

I suppose having that random element also prevents players from figuring out the meta, which can sometimes make a live service game less fun. Instead of people all choosing the best loadout or skill, their choices are different every time.

Well, Chris, that is well said – the other secret weapon we have is obviously, you know, games like this would want to be serviced in Seasons and all that good stuff, so we would have the power to buff, nerf and add abilities over the game’s lifetime, so there would always be reasons to come back and play.

But yeah, as it plays just now, after hundreds of games, you never get the same build twice, you never get the same run twice.

If each character has the same stock abilities, then, meaning players choose the one they think is coolest, is the hope still that they’ll experiment with different characters? Is this why you’ve put in the unique contextual dialogue, in the hope players will use multiple characters to see all the story permutations?

Yeah. I think by having characters love and hate each other, some fans will be like “well, why does my favorite hate this one”, and then when you play that character you’ll start to kind of understand where that beef is. And maybe they’ll even start to sympathize with the one they maybe hated, or didn’t care about.

That’s been really satisfying to breadcrumb out these stories. In our previous beta we finally had the voiceover in, and within two or three days in the Discord we were getting fan art illustrating love triangles they had discovered, and relationships they had discovered, all on their own.

We don’t hit them over the head [with story], we don’t have a big UI element – it’s just through pinging each other, through reviving each other, through killing each other, they’re understanding this matrix of relationships.

I’ve beat this drum for a little bit, but I think in this market, in this atmosphere, making a really mass-appeal product that everybody kind of likes. but is not hyper specific is maybe not the best strategy.

We think, let’s make something evocative, let’s make something love-hate, with lovers and haters, so that the fans that find it and connect with the story, connect with the map, love the rogue chase, they’re all in.

I mean, we have the luxury of that powerful backbone of PUBG. No shade, but some super corps get the one thing and circle the wagons and do it really well. And PUBG and Krafton are like “fuck it, we ball, let’s try new stuff, let’s take big swings.” I was really honored and privileged that they’re like “hey Dave, go tell a story, go try to find new people to fall in love with our world and make some characters that people could care about”, and that’s been the mission.

“Some super corps get the one thing and circle the wagons and do it really well. And PUBG and Krafton are like ‘f*ck it, we ball, let’s try new stuff, let’s take big swings.'”

I suppose it’s nice to have the ability to take those risks because you have PUBG there as… not necessarily something to fall back on, because that implies it’s a safety net, but something that continues to make solid income and gives you the freedom to experiment with new ideas when others may consider it more of a gamble.

Well, I would definitely emphasize your point that it’s not like a fallback, because I’ve been here nine and a half years, I’ve hopefully helped to make PUBG into what it is, I love PUBG deeply.

But because their philosophy from the beginning has been that starving teams innovate and you don’t need a thousand guys to make a great game, we’ve made DED.NET very lean and responsibly with the fans.

Every step of the way we’ve been testing, we’ve been validating, we’ve been running a Discord, and so if you don’t throw a billion guys at it and you work with the fans closely, I think that’s as virtuous and as safe as you can make a game in 2026.

So is the main priority here to get existing PUBG fans to jump over to DED.NET and play both games, or to bring an entirely new audience in and grow the size of the overall PUBG ecosystem’s player base?

Well, Chris, I’ve got to tell you, something fun about doing media is you go deep on a topic for three days in a row, and you start to think about things differently.

And what I’ve kind of arrived at is this – ideally in your garage, you have a sports car and an SUV, right? You know, I love Ford, and I love a Ford Mustang, but maybe a Ford Bronco would be cool too. Maybe that’s okay.

So I think for some PUBG players – and you know, when we’re doing betas and letting betas in, of course we have the best touch with existing PUBG fans, we have their Krafton IDs, we can reach them and talk to them – so a lot of PUBG guys have come over and played.

And some are like: “Oh, this is the evolution it needed. This is the right kick in the ass, I’m all in.” And others are like: “Ah, it’s too fast, too crazy, I don’t like how unfair it is having different builds colliding.” And both are valid.

But I’m just as interested in getting, like, Balatro fans, or other shooter fans. Our value proposition is that this still, when you get to that final circle, is fucking PUBG. Even though on the way there, it’s fast, frenetic, unhinged, chaotic, when you’re in that last circle it’s PUBG. But getting there, better in my opinion, faster, leaner traversal, a more interactive world…

As a quick aside, in PUBG when you see a window, the play is if it’s broken, you know someone’s been there and looted. If it’s not, okay, great, and you can crash through the window.

In our game, if you see a window, you can silently but slowly open it. You can quickly open it so it protects the glass but it makes a little bit of noise. You can shoot it out or crash through like normal, but that will create little pools of glass that for the rest of the match will make a loud noise if you walk on it.

But then you can try to cover that up by maybe turning on the jukebox in the dive bar, or playing a little music on your own boombox. And so our goal is to make a world with a lot of hooks for memorable stories.

You mentioned the boombox which plays Wu-Tang music, can you tell me more about how that works? Is that a standard ability or one of the random ones you can get during a run?

Thank you for asking to clarify – we have a lot of abilities, we call them ‘Romz’. Imagine a tiny ‘90s game cartridge that you mash into your head – a little body horror – but each one, kind of like how Neo would learn Kung Fu in The Matrix, you shove one of these in and you learn a new ability.

So one of the abilities, which we call Boombox, allows you to blast some of the mid ‘90s music we’ve licensed, whether it’s Wu-Tang Clan or Nine Inch Nails, and when that music’s playing, you – and your squad if they’re close enough to you – are slowly regenerating health. So now you’re a big target because the other teams want to stop that.

So that’s really good, I find, for an Assault build where you’re trying to bait guys into close quarters combat. So maybe an Akimbo build, a Breacher build where if you smash through doors, if anyone’s near that door, they’re temporarily blinded.

And it’s also really great for Support. Maybe you’ve got the riot shield, maybe you’ve taken a body modification where you’re seven feet tall, you’ve got 20 more hit points, you’re a little bit more Tanky.

Boombox is one of my favorite abilities because no one else is doing anything like it. It hits that ‘90s music I love so much and it creates really, really funny scenarios, because you never get to pick the song. Sometimes you’re like, “let’s do it!” and a very off-mood song will come on, it’s pretty hilarious.

“One of the abilities, which we call Boombox, allows you to blast some of the mid ‘90s music we’ve licensed, whether it’s Wu-Tang Clan or Nine Inch Nails, and when that music’s playing, you – and your squad if they’re close enough to you – are slowly regenerating health. So now you’re a big target because the other teams want to stop that.”

What does seasonal content look like in the future? Is the main focus on adding new characters, new skins for existing ones, new skills?

They’re in lockstep. First of all, the fans will let us know. The cool thing about these kinds of things is there’s this handshake between developer and community of like “what do you guys want?”.

But what we think we want, is we already have another 12 characters VO’ed and in the pipe. More characters, more stories and crazier abilities, and we think it just makes sense to have characters show up alongside a couple of powers, so that if you’re a fan you’re like “ah, maybe those powers don’t look good but I love the look of that character,” or vice versa. “Oh man, that characters, not for me, but I want to try that unhinged ability.”

And of course, also, our learnings from PUBG are that guns and vehicles are such a great way… new ways to get across the map. We’re launching with a motorcycle and an SUV, so you can imagine, like: “Hey, where’s the boat? Where’s the sports car?” All that stuff, we would be thinking about there as well.

So if part of the plan is to react to player feedback instead of just working through a set roadmap, how far ahead have you planned new content for after launch?

Chris, it’s fucking crazy. Because you have to be able to see the next three months, and the next year. You have to be able to see both.

So I think aspirationally, we have a pretty clear view on what the first three months would look like, and then the broad strokes for the rest of the year, but you also don’t want to plan that whole year perfectly, in case you get it wrong. You know, you don’t want to over-index on something that the fans maybe didn’t respond to.

But yeah, the first three months we’re split between themed seasons. You know, we’ve got this mid ‘90s setting and this kind of grungehouse [style] – which is kind of a grunge ‘90s Kurt Cobain mixed with grindhouse, that’s just an easy, like, “we’re grungehouse”.

So we’re kind of deciding, is that first season maybe a summer camp? Because it’s in this beautiful Pacific Northwest region, a lot of water, a lot of beaches. So is it like “what are all these characters like on summer break”, or is it like a slasher movie, where they’re all kind of Final Girls and evil, horrendous killers?

This is for cosmetics – the characters themselves are agnostic to the seasonal themes – but it’s fun to imagine what those themes would be, and that’s why I’m super stoked for this upcoming beta, is to validate with a larger outside audience which characters are really resonating, which ones need a little bit more love.

A previous journalist was talking about the old days of when you used to just make a game, and then it would just be done. But my first game which came to market was Singularity, and that was a cult classic – which means it didn’t make any money! When it came out, oh my God, what we would have given to give it a little bit more love, or a couple more levels, or a couple more monsters. So I really feel fortunate that now games are living works of art that you craft with the community.