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PUBG update: Playerunknown's Battlegrounds on Xbox finally gets new map as well as performance upgrades

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has finally received a new map, as part of one of its biggest updates for the Xbox ever.

PUBG is one of the biggest games in the world, and in many ways established the battle royale genre that is now seen in games from Fortnite to the new Call of Duty. But it has been left behind in recent months, amid a slew of updates to its main competitor.

Now developers have finally announced that PUBG players on Xbox will at least get a new map, known as Miramar. It is desert-themed and will appear in the game in addition to the original map, Erangel, which had a Soviet theme.

Until now, Erangel was the only map that Xbox players could actually use.

Developers said they had created the new map to be a "vastly different Battle Royale experience". It will require gamers to play very differently, it said, and will prioritise other kinds of skills from the original map.

It also has new guns and new vehicles. They include a pick-up truck.

The game will also now include emotes, another feature that has been present for some time in Fortnite. They can be selected by pressing LB and RB at the same time, which will bring up a devoted menu.

As well as the new content, developers Bluehole said that the performance of the game has been vastly improved. At times, the rendering of objects in the game has been so slow that it isn't possible to play it – for some people, especially on older consoles, whole buildings will be off limits because they have not been rendered yet – but that has been sped up and fixed, they said.

The update – which will automatically download if you try to open the game – is 9.6GB, meaning that it could take some time to actually arrive.