PUBG creator Brendan Greene just released a free tech demo of his new game engine on Steam that lets you play with 'an Earth-scale world generated in real-time'

How do you follow up the creation of one of the biggest games of all time? If you're Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown, it's by building something even bigger. Greene, creator of PUBG, founded a studio called PlayerUnknown Productions where he and his team have been working on a massively multiplayer sandbox called Artemis: a digital world the size of an actual planet.

Today on the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, Greene revealed that he's ready to let players get some hands-on time with the engine powering that planet by releasing Preface: Undiscovered World. Preface is a tech demo of the engine the studio is using to build Artemis, which generates planets "using machine learning technology [and] natural Earth data to generate these worlds from latent space," Greene said.

Want to see a planet-sized planet on your own desktop? You can download Preface: Undiscovered World on Steam and play with it for free right now.

“In Preface, users can witness an Earth-scale world generated in real-time by our machine learning agents directly on their GPU," Greene said, along with "some simple systems to allow you to explore it."

I haven't had the chance to play with Preface myself yet, but I've watched Greene demonstrate early builds of it for me twice now: once at GDC in 2023, and this year when I visited PlayerUnknown Productions back in July. I was impressed both times as the engine first generated a planet viewable from outer space, then formed terrain, mountains, valleys, trees, and rocks when Greene zoomed into the surface from orbit. After those two teases, I'm excited to finally get my hands on the planet builder myself and take it for a spin.

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A forest through which a blue sky can be seen — (Image credit: PlayerUnknown Productions)

Greene said the creation of Artemis "is going to be a five or 10 year journey," and in July he told me the ultimate goal is to build "not just a game engine, [but a] world engine, or a digital place engine. But really, it's building a holodeck, building a space that you can create whatever experiences you want."

Preface wasn't the only announcement Greene had at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted today. He also announced that Prologue, the open world survival game PlayerUnknown Productions is working on, will enter early access on Steam next year. You can read more about Prologue here.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.