PlayerUnknown Productions is surfacing after years of development with a three-game plan to enable what founder Brendan Greene refers to as a next generation of survival games.

Greene is the inventor of the battle royale genre in video games, inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000). In modern parlance, battle royale is like the Squid Game (Netflix TV show) where matches start with 100 or so people in an ever-shrinking battle space until only one person is left as the winner.

Greene first created a “mod” called DayZ in the Arma universe. Then he teamed up with South Korea’s Krafton to make PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, disrupted shooter games like Call of Duty, and went on to sell more than 80 million copies. Krafton went public and Greene became wealthy from that. That gave him the money to work on something really ambitious.

Then he went off on his own to create a new startup, PlayerUnknown Productions, in 2021 to make a gaming survival world that was a lot like a metaverse. Then Greene gave us a scoop on his ambitions. He was going to create a world called Prologue that had a huge amount of terrain that was like 100 square kilometers. That world would be a test where players would drop into the world and try to survive until they exited the world in a give spot. It would be different every time they dropped into it.

Now Greene has released a video that describes his intentions more concretely. Prologue gets a real preview in the video and the world looks very realistic, with trees and grasses swaying in the wind. And it’s still a huge world, fashioned with machine learning and AI tools.

Prologue is a single-player open-world emergent game within the survival genre and it has a Steam page now.

Secondly there will be a shadow drop of the company’s free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World, showcasing its in-house engine Melba. This demo aims to provide users with an early look at the innovative technology that will power the subsequent titles in the series, and eventually Project Artemis.

Project Artemis is the large-scale end goal project of the series. As described in the past, Greene sees this as an Earth-size world where players can drop in and create their own gaming experiences in different sections of the world. We don’t use the word metaverse so much any more, but that’s what it seems like.

These are the links for Prologue and Preface. They aren’t yet live but will be by the time this story drops.

Prologue: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2943740/Prologue_Go_Wayback/
Preface: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2820060/Preface_Undiscovered_World/

In the video, Greene said he embarked on Prologue three years ago and “then life happened” and it has take three years to get it into a solid and breakthrough shape. Now the company can start sharing it and getting feedback “to make it into really something different.”

“When I started this I was trying to make a larger open world experience than most people made, and we tried to provide a couple of years and we found a way to do that,” Greene said. “We essentially reinvented how you create these worlds using machine learning technology, using natural earth data to generate” the terrain.

Now the company is ready to test this terrain, which will form the basis for the larger worlds. He said the team broke the journey into three stages. The first job was to fill out the terrain of the world. The second was to fill that terrain with lots of interaction when scaling up. And then third, the goal was to pull a bunch of those players onto the world, Greene said.

The company will keep enhancing Prologue with its current game engine and then it will move it over to the next version of its game engine.

Prologue started off as an experiment in Unity and then it moved to Unreal a couple of years ago and the tools have proven to be a solid foundation. The proprietary tech will eventually be able to generate a world with millions if not billions of objects in it, with the help of machine learning.

“It’s more about the large scale and again machine learning is very good at it because it will capture the patterns that we teach it,” Greene said.

The physics will be realistic. If the ground gets wet, the terrain becomes a slippery mud and rivers can form, and these will have repercussions for players as they try to survive in a wilderness. This will make the game challenging, but it can’t be unbeatable, Greene said.

“We’re discovering what is fun, what is not fun but at its core it is about survival. I think the more we can test, the more we can get the feedback from from the users or the players, and that’s one of the reasons why we are going to early access,” Greene said. “The more we can actually engage with the community and get their feedback” the more it can reshape the models in the right way.

Meanwhile, the company is working on Melba, the in-house game engine. It should be able to generate worlds and then regenerate them for the next game.

“The way that we build the engine is allowing us to scale up to large agent interaction,” Greene said. “We have an Earth-scale planner with some various biomes and some simple systems to allow you to explore it.”

The company is working on two projects at once — one with Unreal and another with Melba — so that it doesn’t develop tech in a vacuum, said CTO Laurent Gorga, in the video. Unreal and Prologue will generate a piece of the world. Preface will help achieve the scale, and then Artemis will be the full expression.

“I want to get our tech into the hands of the people out there to help us perform what this tech will become,” Greene said. “Like this terrain tech is interesting, but I really need, I want to leave it open. I want to leave it moddable.”

Greene said this may be a five or 10-year journey, but Prologue could be available on Steam in the second quarter of next year.