Today on the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, creator of PUBG, announced that his next project, a survival game called Prologue: Go Wayback! will launch into early access on Steam next year.
When I say "next project" I really mean "one of his next projects." Greene is cooking up several at his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, including a tech demo of his new game engine which was released today on Steam. You can download Preface: Undiscovered World right now and explore "an Earth-scale world generated in real-time" on your PC.
As for Prologue, it's "a single-player open world emergent game within the survival genre" and it'll be entering early access in Q2 of 2025. You may not have to wait quite that long, however, as the studio says "a series of playtests" will precede the early access launch.
We've heard a bit about Prologue over the last few years, a survival experience Greene described as "a prototype of an idea. We'll use early access to build on that and make it into a full product. It allows you to have a new map to play on every time you press play," he said.
"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," Greene said.
"It's not just raining and moody, it's not just an aesthetic thing," said Alexander Helliwell, senior artist at PlayerUnknown Productions. "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, Prologue will generate an entirely new 8x8 km map. That map generation system is part of what will someday become Artemis, the massively multiplayer sandbox that's the ultimate goal for PlayerUnknown Productions.
Prologue is built in Unreal but will use the studio's "in-house machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology, allowing the instant creation of millions of maps."
Prologue is just the start of the studio's "three-game plan" that will lead up to Artemis, which according to Greene is roughly five to 10 years away. "After Prologue, two more games are planned for release in the coming years, each addressing critical technical challenges that will bring the studio closer to the final product," Greene said. "With Prologue, we aim to engage players and introduce them to the emergent mechanics and expansive worlds we’re developing."
You can visit Prologue: Go Wayback!'s Steam page here, and if you're interested in participating in a playtest before its early access launch, I'd recommend joining the official Discord.
