PlayerUnknown Talks About The Massive Ambition Of "Tech Demo" Prologue

PlayerUnknown's next project has become a little more ... well, known. Brendan Greene, who departed PUBG: BattleGrounds maker Krafton earlier this week to form his own company, today dropped a video via Twitter to explain a few top-level details about Prologue, the new title in development by his PlayerUnknown Productions.

Greene cited a "deep fascination with sandbox-style, open-world games" but wished they were "a bit bigger." He wants his company to create worlds "hundreds of kilometers across with thousands of players, interacting, exploring, and creating."

One of the difficulties Greene cites with creating a world on that scale is filling it with assets and content. He plans to use machine learning and a neural network to "generate massive, realistic open worlds at run time."

Prologue, then, is a tech demo "intended to serve as a simple introduction to an early iteration of our technology." You'll have to navigate "a run-time-generated wilderness" and survive against the harshness of the climate with the resources you find along the way. It will have a "pay what you want" model, and more details will be coming later via an in-depth interview with VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi.

I'm intrigued by Greene's ambition for a mega-huge open-world game -- I like big maps and I cannot lie -- though also more than a little apprehensive about his ultimate plan. Tech issues are obviously going to be at the forefront, but even if everything works as intended, what would the final product be like? Is it just going to be a survival game or battle royale, but bigger? That might be enough for some, and maybe even for me at first, but it seems like the novelty will wear off quickly. Lots of MMO titles through the years promised bigger and bigger maps, encounters, PvP matches, and so on, but very few had anything going for them other than being huge. We'll just have to wait and see how things progress.

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— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) September 3, 2021