Brendan Greene, better known as PUBG creator PlayerUnknown, has finally revealed a proper look at what he’s working on three years after announcing his new game.
Greene’s studio PlayerUnknown Productions is working on three new games, the first of which is announced today. It’s called Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player open-world “emergent” game within the survival genre, and its Steam page is live now.
There’s also a shadow drop of a free tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World, which shows off PlayerUnknown Productions’ in-house engine, Melba. The developer said the demo is designed to give players an early look at the tech that powers its upcoming games, and eventually Project Artemis. Project Artemis is described as the “large-scale end goal project” of the series, a massively multiplayer sandbox experience designed for thousands of players.
Digging into the details, PlayerUnknown Productions said Prologue: Go Wayback! is developed using the studio’s “machine learning-driven” terrain generation tech, which enables the “instant” creation of millions of maps. The developers plan to get playtesters in soon, with an Early Access launch set for the second quarter of 2025 (so, at some point April to June).
On the tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World, Greene commented: “In Preface, users can witness an Earth-scale world generated in real-time by our machine learning agents directly on their GPU. This digital planet is still quite empty for now, but every person who enters it and shares their feedback, contributes to its future development.”
In his note to press, Greene acknowledged the "challenges ahead” for his 60-person Amsterdam studio, and called on fans to help out by providing feedback. There's no timeframe for when Project Artemis will release, but Greene described the endeavor as a "five or 10-year journey."
“My vision for Artemis is challenging, but we plan to take it one step at a time and the three games aim to give us a solid tech foundation on which to scale up,” he admitted. “After Prologue, two more games are planned for release in the coming years, each addressing critical technical challenges that will bring the studio closer to the final product. With Prologue, we aim to engage players and introduce them to the emergent mechanics and expansive worlds we’re developing.”
Greene is famous for creating the DayZ battle royale and PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale mods before sparking the battle royale surge in early 2017 with the release of standalone game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. He left PUBG custodian Krafton and the battle royale genre behind in 2019 to go it alone with his own studio.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
