PUBG: Dednet integrates roguelike progression into multiplayer first-person shooter gameplay, deliberately maintaining skill gaps between players. Creative Director Dave Curd stated that the game aims to continue the PUBG experience through faster, more chaotic, and asymmetric matches.
Unlike PUBG, where all participants start from the same baseline, PUBG: Dednet encourages players to continue to the next round after failure. Regardless of their ranking in the previous round, characters gradually become stronger through consecutive challenges, giving players the opportunity to shift the balance of power in later matches.
Curd cited an example where an average-skilled player on their eighth round might face a highly skilled player just starting their first. The latter still has a good chance of winning due to superior aim, but the former's accumulated abilities may help them secure kills. The development team hopes this disparity leads to more unpredictable encounters.
Earlier versions featured a more pronounced ability gap: players with five abilities could directly encounter new players who had not yet acquired any. Curd acknowledged that this design received polarized feedback and made it difficult for many newcomers to cope.
The team then worked to control the disparity. Each player can have up to five abilities, which activate at different stages of a match. In the first stage, players are roughly equal in strength; by the fifth stage, players who have completed five, six, or more rounds gain a significant advantage.
This design also encourages players to engage actively. As the match progresses, it becomes harder for those with fewer rounds to win, making early offensive strategies more advantageous. The team views players stopping engagements to hide as a deviation from the intended design, hoping instead that players use their abilities to pursue and clash with opponents.
The overall loop of PUBG: Dednet emphasizes speed and continuity, with character builds accumulating across multiple rounds. Players must rely not only on ability progression but also on improving their mechanical skills through repeated failures and engagements until they achieve victory in subsequent matches.