Prologue: Go Wayback! is the next game for PlayerUnknown Productions. It's an upcoming survival game which is heading into early access soon, but it has longer aspirations and goals than just getting to launch, it's just the first step towards the ultimate goal of making a meterverse.
"The bigger vision is creating an Open Source Engine to create digital places," Brendan Greene, creator of PUBG tells me. "Like multiple digital worlds for everyone. The three steps or three games are basically solving technology challenges, the first being the terrain." The next step is to test out massively multiplayer worlds, and the final part will be meshing everything together in a 3D internet. But getting there will take some time, by Greene's estimation, 10 to 15 years. To ensure the devs can keep working on this long haul project, Greene is currently looking for different ways to finance it.
"We're looking to raise some funding so we insulate the team from having to turn a profit too soon," Greene says. "If Prologue doesn't do well, I want them to be insulated. It happens to too many studios, the vision gets lost because they have to make something that turns over profit."
Greene has previously discussed how he's aware that most players probably won't vibe with Prologue. It's a pretty difficult survival game, with punishing weather and hunger systems which are tricky to navigate. It's also more of a survival simulation than a narrative story game, meaning that the only thing to do is survive, get to the objective, and repeat. But being a well-rounded survival crafting game isn't necessarily the end goal of Prologue: "It's very targeted, solving this particular problem and showcasing the tech, it's not designed to be a game for everyone."
Compare this to a lot of the other games releasing right now, many of which are either continuations of a popular series like Monster Hunter or use existing successful characters and formulas like Marvel Rivals, and Prologue's not exactly got a leg up. But Greene doesn't think that's necessarily a bad thing: "You see [other studios] just hitting trends. It's not a great place in gaming at the moment where there's just a lot of studios being just broken up. And it comes again from people creating IP bubbles and conglomeration of companies, and then teams are let go, it's a very depressing place.
"Unfortunately, the general mentality of a lot of CEOs and founders is, 'I have to make my bag,' and I've been lucky that I've made a small bag already. I don't really care if this does well. But I'm not doing it to make money. I think at scale, if we do end up making a 3D place, we could make a lot of money from it, but that shouldn't ever be the aim."
But before the devs move onto their next project, Greene still wants to be able to showcase everything that Prologue can do. "I think eventually, with Prologue, we'll hopefully have six months of updates planned after early access launch, so that we can show the community that we want to make this better," Greene says. "Do the No Man's Sky, where it comes out a bit broken, and just keep updating. Now look at [No Man's Sky] today, it's this fantastic game, right? It just shows the power of continuity."
For now the aim is making sure the team have enough financial stability that they can polish up Prologue and then move onto the next project without having to worry too much about its reception and monetary success. It may sound difficult, but the alternative isn't isn't something that Greene wants to consider: "We'll end up making some product, or just another PlayerUnknown game that we can sell. I don't want that, that's the easy road."
