A fully bearded Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene talks about his new project and how it aims to elevate Survival to dimensions never seen before.
It’s been quiet for a long time around one of the most colourful figures in recent video game history. It’s about Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene, the creator of PUBG. The shooter jumped in front of the Battle Royale bandwagon in 2017, dragging large swathes of the shooter market behind it and still occupying the Steam top record of over three million concurrently active passengers, pardon, players.
Now the developer is coming out of the woodwork: until now, all that was known was that he was working on something new called Prologue at the specially formed Krafton studio PUBG Special Projects, and an ominous trailer was pretty much the only info:
Recently, it was revealed that Greene left the PUBG developer to open his own studio Playerunknown Productions, where Prologue is now in final development. Krafton bought in with a minority stake.
But what the hell is this guy doing? On Twitter, Greene got back to us and spoke in more detail about what the Prologue shown and the technology behind it is supposed to do. And his ambitions don’t spare superlatives.
— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) September 3, 2021
Greatest survival game the world has ever seen?
The title hints at it: Prologue is only supposed to give a foretaste of a future game or a new technique. “Soon” Prologue will be released as a kind of tech demo outlining further plans. Every player should be able to try out Prologue, at a price of his or her choosing.
Greene explains that he had “a deep fascination” with games like DayZ, but always wished that the game worlds and player numbers had been even bigger. Much bigger! That’s why he wants to build a survival game whose world is “hundreds of kilometres wide” and offers space for “thousands of players”.
That would be revolutionary, even compared to the huge DayZ world of Chernarus, which spans 225 square kilometres. 100 times 100 km alone would be 10,000 square kilometres!
Gigantomaniac dimensions for a game, which the ambitious developer wants to achieve with the help of an artificial neural network that generates landscapes and fills them with content.
The gameplay is supposed to revolve around survival: Players are supposed to fight dangerous weather conditions and nature with tools and have to reach a faraway place. And that takes … as long as it takes to jog hundreds of kilometres.
