Playerunknown's next game Prologue is an open world survival tech demo
They're working on machine learning for bigger worlds
Earlier this week, Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene of Plunkbat fame announced that he would be leaving PUBG Corp parents Krafton to found a new studio called Playerunknown Productions. Today, Greene has posted a video explaining a bit about the studio's first project called Prologue—first teased back in 2019. It will launch first as a tech demo about surviving in a procedurally generated wilderness, Greene says, and it'll also be "a chance to look at what we've accomplished by leveraging machine learning" for huge open worlds. Greene has explained more about Prologue today, with more information coming soon.
First off, here's Greene's video with a bit of an introduction to the new studio and the project.
Greene explains some of the issues that his team has been working to tackle with Prologue—things we often hear about with big open world sandboxes. How do you make the world even bigger—because I suppose we've decided they do always need to be bigger—while making sure they're full of things that are actually interesting?
"That's our mission as a studio," Greene says. "We want to create realistic sandbox worlds on a scale that's seldom attempted. Worlds hundreds of kilometers across, with thousands of players interacting, exploring, and creating."
That's what Playerunknown Productions are looking to create with Prologue, it sounds like. If you happened to miss it back at the end of 2019, this is its teaser trailer.
Now, Greene gives a slightly more detailed explanation of what Prologue actually is aside from a forest thunder storm simulation.
"In Prologue, you'll need to find your way across a runtime generated wilderness and use found tools and gathered resources to survive on a journey where harsh weather is your constant foe," Greene says. "There will be no guidance, no path for you to follow, just a world, a spot on the map to reach, and the tools needed to get there."
Pardon me for saying so but that sounds like an early access survival game to me—and also maybe an MMO. So, No Man's Rust? Whatever it is, Greene says that Prologue will launch first as a tech demo. "Prologue is intended to serve as a simple introduction to an early iteration of our technology and a chance to look at what we've accomplished by leveraging machine learning," he says. To that end, the initial demo will be avilable on a pay-what-you-want basis. That's neat, anyhow.
It's certainly more to go on than the virtually nothing we had about Prologue before. Greene says there's more yet though. He's sat down for a chat with VentureBeat, who will be sharing more details in an interview being published on Saturday.