Nearly five years after teasing his next project, PUBG Battlegrounds creator Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene and his PlayerUnknown Productions team have revealed new details on their ambitious three-game plan. That starts today with the surprise release of Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo that dynamically generates a massive, Earth-scale world for players to explore.
Preface promises just a taste of PlayerUnknown Productions’ machine learning game technology, known as Melba. The tech demo lets players journey through a 200 million square mile world, with dynamic points of interest to visit and a postcard system to document players’ journeys. Players’ time in Preface will inform the developer’s next project, Prologue: Go Wayback! Gameplay data from Preface will help refine the billions of future worlds of Prologue, the developer says, and the studio’s “end goal” project after that.
Prologue: Go Wayback! is a single-player, open-world emergent game in the survival genre, PlayerUnknown Productions said in a new video. Prologue will give players “a new map to play on every time you press play” and will task players with surviving the journey across that dynamically generated map. Players will face unpredictable weather and ever-changing landscapes, utilizing resources to survive harsh conditions. They’ll be able to craft and repair shelters and other tools as they fight to reach a weather station and call for help.
While Preface: Undiscovered World is available now for Windows PC via Steam, Prologue: Go Wayback! will go into early access sometime in Q2 2025, the developer said.
Ultimately, PlayerUnknown Productions plans to deliver a project known as “Artemis”, described by the studio as “the large-scale ‘end goal’ project of the series.” Details on that project are still forthcoming, but if its predecessors present Earth-sized playgrounds for survival enthusiasts to explore, the studio’s “end goal” ambitions must be even bigger.
An early look at Prologue: Go Wayback! in screenshot form can be seen in the gallery below.
