Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, the creator of PUBG, has announced multiple new projects, with his main new title being a survival game called Prologue: Go Wayback! which launches into early access on Steam in 2025.
Prologue: Go Wayback! is explained as a "single-player open world emergent game within the survival genre" that will be available on Steam in early access form in Q2 2025, however, the developer teases that a "series of playtests" will begin before the early access launch.
Greene describes Prologue as a survival experience, and a "prototype of an idea" that will use the early access version to build upon, turning it into a full product. Prologue: Go Wayback! will see gamers playing on a new map, each and every time they play the game. Greene added: "We have a simple survival loop. Get from one side of the map to the other side of the map with some difficult weather on the way".
Alexander Helliwell, senior artist at PlayerUnknown Productions added: "it's not just raining and moody, it's not just an aesthetic thing. It's not just that the player is cold and wet. Suddenly now, oh wait, mud forms, rivers go up. If you die, that's it".
Each time you play, the game will generative a totally new 8x8km map, with the map generation system created by PlayerUnknown Productions, will eventuate into "Artemis" which is the massively multiplayer sandbox game that is the "ultimate goal" of the developer.
Preface: Undiscovered World
PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions has also today launched a free tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World, showcasing its in-house engine 'Melba'. Available now on Steam, this demo aims to provide users with an early look at the innovative technology that will power the subsequent titles in the series, and eventually project Artemis.
Studio founder and Chief Creative Officer Brendan Greene said "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".
Prologue: Go Wayback!
In dedication to this, the studio has today launched a Steam page for the first title in the series Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player open-world emerging game within the survival genre that the studio will develop using its in-house machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology, allowing the instant creation of millions of maps. The studio will engage the community early in the development of Prologue with a series of playtests then aims to launch the game in Early Access on Steam in Q2 of 2025.
Project Artemis
On the studio's final goal, project ' Artemis', Greene said "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. After Prologue, two more games are planned for release in the coming years, each addressing technical critical challenges that will bring the studio closer to the final product. With Prologue, we aim to engage players and introduce them to the emerging mechanics and expansive worlds we're developing."
