PlayerUnknown Productions is emerging after years of development with a three-game plan to enable what it has founded Brendan Greene refers to the next generation of survival games.
Greene is the inventor of the battle royale genre in video games, inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000). In modern parlance, Battle Royale is like Squid Game (Netflix TV show) where matches start with around 100 people in an increasingly smaller battle space until only one person remains as the winner.
Greene first created a “mod” called DayZ in the Arma universe. Then it teamed up with South Korea’s Krafton to make PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, revolutionizing shooter games like Call of Duty and selling more than 80 million copies. Krafton went public and Greene became rich because of it. This gave him the money to work on something really ambitious.
Then he set out on his own to create a new startup, PlayerUnknown Productionsin 2021 to create a survival world for video games that looked a lot like a metaverse. Then Greene gave us one exploit his ambitions. He would create a world called Prologue that had a huge amount of land equal to about 100 square kilometers. That world would be a test where players would enter the world and try to survive until they exit the world at a certain point. It would be different every time they fell into it.
Now Greene has released a video that more concretely describes his intentions. The prologue has a real preview in the video and the world looks very realistic, with trees and grass swaying in the wind. And it’s still a huge world, modeled with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.
Prologue is an emerging single-player open world game in the survival genre, and it now has a Steam page.
Secondly there will be a shadow of the company’s free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World, which will feature its in-house Melba engine. This demo aims to provide users with a first look at the innovative technology that will power subsequent titles in the series and, ultimately, Project Artemis.
Project Artemis is the final large-scale goal project in the series. As described in the past, Greene sees it as an Earth-sized world that players can enter and create their own gaming experiences in different sections of the world. We don’t use the word metaverse that much anymore, but it feels like it.
These are links to the Prologue and Preface. They are not published yet but will be when this story ends.
Prologue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2943740/Prologue_Go_Wayback/
Preface: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2820060/Preface_Undiscovered_World/
In the video, Greene said that he undertook Prologue three years ago and “then life happened” and that it took three years to give it a solid, groundbreaking form. Now the company can start sharing it and receiving feedback “to turn it into something truly different”.
“When I started I was trying to create a larger open world experience than most people do, and we tried to give it a couple of years and found a way to do it,” Greene said. “We essentially reinvented how you create these worlds using machine learning technology, using the earth’s natural data to generate” the terrain.
Now the company is ready to test this ground, which will form the basis for larger worlds. He said the team divided the journey into three phases. The first job was to fill the ground of the world. The second was to fill that terrain with lots of interactions during development. And then third, the goal was to bring a group of those players into the world, Greene said.
The company will continue to improve Prologue with its current game engine and then move it to the next version of its game engine.
Prologue started as an experiment in Unity and then moved to Unreal a couple of years ago and the tools have proven to be a solid foundation. Proprietary technology will finally be able to generate a world with millions if not billions of objects in it, with the help of machine learning.
“This is more of a large-scale question, and again, machine learning is very good because it will capture the patterns that we teach it,” Greene said.
The physics will be realistic. If the ground gets wet, it becomes slippery mud and rivers can form, which will impact players trying to survive in the wilderness. That will make the game challenging, but it won’t be unbeatable, Greene said.
“We’re finding out what’s fun and what’s not, but the bottom line is survival. I think the more we can test, the more we can get feedback from users or players, and that’s one of the reasons we’ll have early access,” Greene said. “The more we can actually interact with the community and get their feedback.” , the more we can reshape models in the right way.
Meanwhile, the company is working on Melba, the in-house game engine. It should be able to generate worlds and then regenerate them for the next game.
“The way we build the engine allows us to scale it up to interact with large agents,” Greene said. “We have an Earth-scale planner with some various biomes and some simple systems to let you explore it.”
The company is working on two projects at the same time, one with Unreal and another with Melba, so as not to develop the technology in a vacuum, CTO Laurent Gorga said in the video. Unreal and Prologue will generate a piece of the world. The preface will help achieve scale, and then Artemis will be the complete expression of it.
“I want to get our technology into the hands of people out there to help us realize what this technology will become,” Greene said. “This terrain technology is interesting, but I really need it, I want to leave it open. I want to leave it editable.
Greene said this could be a five- or 10-year journey, but Prologue could be available on Steam in the second quarter of next year.
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