PUBG creator Brendan Greene, better known by his moniker 'PlayerUnknown' has unveiled a new three-game plan, as well as a tech demo that's available now.
Revealed during the PC Gaming Show, Greene and his studio confirmed "an ambitious three-game plan" that kicks off with a Steam page for Prologue: Go Wayback! Described as "a single-player open-world emergent game," Prologue: Go Wayback! appears to be the evolution of Prologue, the project that Greene announced in 2019 with a mysterious trailer. A press release confirms the survival and terrain generation that Greene discussed five years ago, and announces that a series of playtests are on their way ahead of an early access Steam release in the second quarter of 2025.
If you want an early look at some of what Greene and his team have been working on before those playtests, however, you'll want to look at Preface: Undiscovered World. A free tech-demo that's available today on Steam, Greene says that Preface shows off "an Earth-scale world generated in real-time." It sounds as though there's not much to see right now, but the feedback provided here will eventually power future games, like third and final announcement: Project Artemis.
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Artemis is the least-defined of the three reveals Greene is making today. In a press release, he says his vision for the project is "challenging, but we plan to take it one step at a time." Once the three games are complete - two more "are planned for release in the coming years" after Prologue - Artemis will ensure that the studio will have "a solid tech foundation on which to scale up." Prologue, it seems, is just the start, an attempt to "introduce" players to the emergent worlds that Greene is creating.
On its website, the studio says that the goal of Artemis "is to be able to procedurally generate realistic worlds thousands of kilometres wide as rich and textured as the real world," and the proceed "to let thousands of people loose onto these giant maps." I'm reminded of Light No Fire, the new game from the No Man's Sky team, which similarly intends to create giant worlds to allow players to explore with minimal limitations.
Check out our list of the best survival games - even if next year will offer up some new challengers.
