Brendan Greene is largely credited with making the iconic PlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundsalso known as PUBGand inventing the entire battle royale genre. We knew he left the publisher of PUBG to form an independent study in 2021, but now we know what he’s been working on for the past few years.
His studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, is preparing a handful of titles, which he refers to as “an ambitious three-game plan.” First, there is Prologue: Back!which is described as “a pop-up open-world single-player game within the survival genre”. It uses the developer’s “terrain generation technology powered by machine learning” to create “millions of maps.” These maps are also easy on the eyes, as seen below.
We don’t know much about the gameplay beyond the description and terrain generation technology mentioned above. However, it is available wishlist right now on Steam. The company says it will launch as an early access title sometime in the first half of next year, following a series of playtests.
There’s also a slick-looking tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World. It’s free and available to download right now. This demo is being released to showcase the company’s internal game engine, called Melba. Prologue allows players to explore a “real-time generated Earth-scale world”.
Greene says that this “digital planet is still pretty empty, but every person who comes in and shares their feedback contributes to its future development.” To this end, the Melba engine will be used to develop other games in the future.
One such future game is called Artemiswhich is described as a “massive multiplayer sandbox experience”. We don’t know much about the title, except that it’s probably years away. Greene says his company will release two unannounced games after Prologue: Back! each will address “critical technical challenges” that will help the development of the most ambitious Artemis. In any case, it looks like PlayerUnknown Productions is off to a promising start.
