PlayerUnknown offers a closer look at Battlegrounds' new desert map

Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene has offered another look at Battlegrounds' upcoming desert map. And it's not just a bunch of sand!

Battlegrounds' desert map was first revealed earlier this year, when Greene confirmed that two new maps were currently in development. The other, set in the Adriatic, is a mountainous island with a snowy peak and an old cosmodrome in the centre.

Battlegrounds' desert map will be the first of the two to arrive, although no firm (or indeed vague) release date has yet been offered.

Despite the desert map's ever-looming presence, relatively few details have been officially revealed beyond its size: 8x8 km, the same as Battlgrounds' original Erangel map. Pretty much everything else has been inferred through careful examination of screenshots.

Dataminers, however, have uncovered a little more, revealing a full work-in-progress version of the desert map that includes a mixture of desolate sandy wasteland - complete with craters and limited water features - and surprisingly dense urban sprawl.

The newly released images give a good look at both, as you can see in the tweets above. There are ample hills, densely packed buildings, some sort of high-security military base, a smattering of shacks, and, yes, an awful lot of sand. The key takeaway though is that the map looks to offer considerably more variety than the word "desert" would initially suggest.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds will come to Xbox One on December 12th, as part of the console's early access-style Xbox Game Preview programme. It's expected to leave early access on PC before the year is out.