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The latest and greatest gaming feud, Bluehole Studios' PUBG and Epic Games' Fortnite, is taking on a new level of competition. The PUBG development team laid out their plans for 2018 and it looks like they are trying to copy some of the more successful elements of what Fortnite brings to the increasingly-competitive battle royale.

News comes from the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds development blog, where the studio was hoping to clear the air and create a prioritization list for the community. The most notable change in the works is a brand new island map that is set to be only 4x4km -- likely the biggest play towards the Fortnite audience. This new map will be available on PUBG's experimental test server starting next month.

Now, you may be asking: why is this a move aimed at Fortnite? As noted by Redditor MoeMetA, the PUBG map is significantly larger than Fortnite's, which is roughly 3x3km as compared to 66:

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By shrinking the map down to a 44 space as seen below, PUBG's games will become much quicker and action-packed as players are confined to more dense locations from the very start. This, in turn, will lead to shorter matches, something that gets near-universal praise in the battle royale genre.

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Of course, this isn't the only change coming out of Fortnite's playbooks. Another addition coming to the list of changes is an Emote System -- a feature that will be coming to the Test Server "very soon." For an idea of what this looks like, check out the gallery below:


Of course, not everything on the roadmap is targeting the Fortnite audiences and much of the upcoming plans are simple tweaks and polishing of what PUBG does best. Improving on the graphics, the art team is reportedly working on all around improvements to make the game more aesthetically pleasing. For instance, check out the new art direction on buildings:

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Apart from that, the developer is planning on adding new Game Modes, new vehicles, and new weapons to bring some added variety. Additionally, for a UI update they hope to add in Achievements, in-game friends list, and main menu voice chat support.

As you can imagine, another major focus for the development team is working out the kinks in stability -- a task which is a much more common topic of discussion for both the developers and the community. In this respect, Bluehole noted "it is impossible to solve these problems once and for all, but our goal is to continuously improve in this regard."

Other occasional tweaks being worked on throughout the year is an improvement in sound design, a focus on creating eSport tools, and implementation and expansion of Custom Games that will come later through the year.

And while PUBG is taking an aggressive stance when it comes to development, so to is their biggest competitor Fortnite. Even in the past month, Epic Games has revealed they will support Xbox One cross-platform support, a launch onto mobile platforms, a new 20 person team mode, and Xbox One X optimization.

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