New PUBG game DED.NET trades battle royale for the 1990s

Krafton unveiled PUBG: DED.NET at Gamescom's Opening Night Live, a new multiplayer shooter that trades the battle royale format the PUBG name built its reputation on for something closer to a run-based roguelite. It is set in a fictional 1996 Cascadia, a wooded, mountainous stretch modeled on the Pacific Northwest, rendered in a bright, punk-inspired style that looks nothing like the grounded realism of PUBG: Battlegrounds.

The core loop is built around dying without losing everything. Rather than a single life ending a match for good, each run in DED.NET feeds the next one: what a player scavenges changes their character's traits and abilities heading into subsequent attempts, and losing a match reshapes a run rather than wiping it out.

The specific tactics on display lean into the setting's grunge-era, scavenged-junk aesthetic. Reported mechanics include ripping a car door off its hinges to use as an improvised riot shield, playing dead to avoid detection from other players, and hacking payphones to steal money from rivals. Combat is not purely player versus player, either: the world is populated by hostile creatures the developers call cryptids, making runs through named locations such as Cryptid Cove, Cult Church and the Casacadian Wilderness a mix of PvP and PvE encounters.

Closed beta pre-registration is open now on the game's official site for players who sign in with a Krafton account, though Krafton has not announced a release date, pricing or a confirmed platform list.

DED.NET is a sharp swing for a franchise built almost entirely on one battle royale island format. Whether players who came to PUBG for its hundred-person last-one-standing tension want a roguelite shooter with cryptids and payphone hacking is exactly the kind of question a closed beta exists to answer before Krafton commits further.