For readers of Eurogamer, it may have been a while since you last read much in depth about PUBG - or indeed PUBG Battlegrounds (redundant subtitle duly acknowledged by publisher Krafton) as it's now known in its post-Brendan Greene form.

PUBG is now the brand, Battlegrounds the game, and specifically it's the battle royale one we all played, often obsessively, in its early years.

Only now it's not! Battlegrounds is getting a fresh PvE mode, entirely separate from battle royale, called Xeno Point.

Technically this isn't the first PvE mode in the title - a previous collaboration with Gen Z's beloved viral sensation, Skibidi Toilet, was the first, along with various sort-of modes you could play involving bots - but in a sense Xeno Point feels the most significant take from PUBG on the genre so far.

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It's probably best to think of Xeno Point as a kind of standalone game within PUBG Battlegrounds.

In it, you'll squad up with three others and load into a futuristic hub, where you can expend resources to advance a large skill tree, upgrade special ultimate-style abilities, craft items, and select your gear for the round ahead.

For older PUBG-heads that gear will be plenty familiar.

It's all the standard battle royale weapons, attachments, backpacks and the like, plus a special, slightly unspectacular anti-alien weapon for excellent measure.

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But the twist here is there are now multiple variants of said weapons, now colour-coded and ranked for rarity.

With those rankings come the usual looter-shooter trappings of various percentage buffs to damage dealt with certain weapons, or resisted by your armour - and so optimisation, in theory, will prove increasingly important as you ascend through the levels and difficulty tiers.

1 of 4 Caption Attribution Just how important that'll be, however, was hard to tell from my time with the game.

On the third tier of four - albeit with a mix of epic and legendary gear, which might've been on the overpowered side - the first mission I played was a breeze ## Editor's Note This announcement has sparked considerable discussion among gamers. Source: [Eurogamer](https://www.eurogamer.net/pubgs-new-co-op-pve-mode-xeno-point-offers-a-strange-vision-of-a-post-battle-royale-future)