My first spawn location in PlayerUnknown's upcoming survival game Prologue: Go Wayback! was in a cabin that backed onto a beautiful pristine river that sat at the edge of a densely wooded forest. It was so pretty that, for a moment, I forgot I was in a brutal survival game, and would soon be fending for my life against the elements. So, with that in mind, I turned around to head out the front door, only to open it and find more lake. As it turns out, I wasn't sitting at the edge of a river—I was slap-bang in the middle of it.
After multiple fruitless attempts to create a boat out of a couple of wooden planks I found lying around and a jumper for a sail, a developer popped their head around the door to explain to me that the lakehouse was just a bug and I should probably just restart or try to swim for shore.
So with that, I shamefully waded across the lake and emerged from the depths like a sad, soaked rat, who was also now freezing to death and hungry because swimming the width of a river takes a monumental amount of energy. It wasn't the best way to start a survival game.
It turns out that the lakehouse bug is due to the map generation seeing the flat lake bed and deciding that it's a good place to plonk a cabin. I was also reassured by the developers that this was a known issue and that they had actually fixed it in a recent build. But returning to the lakehouse almost every time I restarted was probably one of the most memorable experiences from my time in Prologue.
Navigation nightmare
After I actually managed to escape the clutches of the lakehouse, I spent a great deal of time wandering around in the wilderness, just trying to experience as much of the map as possible before I inevitably starved to death or fell off a big rock.
At first, navigating with nothing but a compass, a map, and my famously awful sense of direction was pretty intimidating. As the end goal in Prologue involves locating the Weather Station, which is placed somewhere random on the map, navigation isn't something you can just ignore. Before you're able to reach the Weather Station, you also need to find cabins that are placed across the map, as these hold better gear and provide shelter when the weather gets bad.
All of this makes for a pretty tough survival experience.
Prologue isn't as forgiving as other survival games that either give you access to coordinates or show your location on the map. Instead, you need to rely heavily on the compass, using waypoints like the river to coordinate yourself and even keeping an eye out for what side the moss is growing on the rocks if you need to figure out which way is north.
But all of this is just one aspect of Prologue's grueling difficulty. As mentioned beforehand, cabins are one of the safest spaces on the map, and even then, you can die from exposure inside these houses if you fail to start a fire or board up the windows during a storm. Without proper shelter, good gear, a heat source, and constant access to food and water, you won't last long in this wilderness.
All of this makes for a pretty tough survival experience, and while that may not be very fun to begin with, it does make for some fulfilling moments later on, like when I figured out how to start a fire and dry my clothes or when I successfully navigated my way to a cabin.
One is the loneliest number
But without Prologue's tricky navigation or unforgiving survival mechanics, it would probably be pretty boring. Other than you, there's no other form of life in this game: no birds, no bugs, no animals, and no other humans. There is apparently a reason for this in the game's lore—we just don't know what that is yet.
"I want us to have a lore and a reason the world exists," PUBG creator Brendan Greene tells me. "But these first two games have a very light touch of lore, and that makes sense eventually when you learn things. So there's a story in my head, but I'm not ready to tell it yet because I want it to be good."
It's at this point where I should explain that Prologue isn't meant to be a standalone game. Instead, it's the first experiment in a planned trilogy of games that are being used as testing grounds to form the end product: a metaverse. "I want to create the holodeck," Greene says. "A place where you can create your own virtual experience on a planet, or create your own planet, and do it quite easily and quite intuitively."
It may seem like a convoluted approach to creating a 3D internet, but this way, Greene hopes that the PlayerUnknown team has the time and resources to slowly test out ideas and functions that'll be needed later on. It's for this reason that Prologue's sole purpose isn't to be a well-rounded survival game—it's to test out machine learning-generated environments. This is why you get a different map every time you start a game and why the format is more like a roguelike than a story game. Prologue's use is to figure out how well infinitely generated maps and, eventually, worlds can work.
This isn't to say that nothing else will be added to Prologue—the developers have said that they'll host community votes to see what players want added to the game. But grand plans of adding co-op multiplayer or animals to Prologue aren't at the top of the developer's to-do list. "It takes away from getting us to Game Two," Greene says. "Maybe if Prologue does well in early access or on full release, and we have some buffer finance, then we can look to add more lively systems, but that's not the end goal of the game."
Prologue: Go Wayback! is only just about to enter early access, and after a few successful playtests, there is a ton of potential for what's on offer here. The biggest appeal is getting the chance to see the first steps toward the monumental goal of creating a metaverse. But even still, it's important to manage expectations. Prologue isn't and likely never will be a genre-defining survival game. But that doesn't mean it's not worth checking out, especially if you've been looking for a purely difficult and realistic survival experience that isn't bogged down with expansive crafting and an in-depth story.
