Brendan Greene is largely credited with making the iconic PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, also known as PUBG, and inventing the entire battle royale genre. We knew he left PUBG’s publisher to form an independent studio back in 2021, but now we know what he’s been working on the past few years.
His studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, is prepping a handful of titles, which it refers to as “an ambitious three-game plan.” First up, there’s Prologue: Go Wayback!, which is described as “a single-player open-world emergent game within the survival genre.” It uses the developer’s “in-house machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology” to create “millions of maps.” These maps are also easy on the eyes, as seen below.
We don’t know much about the gameplay, beyond the description and the aforementioned terrain generation technology. However, it’s available to wishlist right now on Steam. The company says it’ll launch as an early access title sometime in the first half of next year, following a series of playtests.
There’s also a nifty-looking tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World. It’s free and available to download right now. This demo is being released to showcase the company’s in-house game engine, called Melba. Preface allows players to explore an “Earth-scale world generated in real-time.”
Greene says that this “digital planet is still quite empty for now, but every person who enters it and shares their feedback, contributes to its future development.” To that end, the Melba engine will be used to develop other games in the future.
One such future game is called Artemis, which is described as a “massive multiplayer sandbox experience.” We don’t know a whole lot about the title, except that it’s likely years away. Greene says that his company will be releasing two unannounced games after Prologue: Go Wayback! that will each address “critical technical challenges” that will help with the development of the more ambitious Artemis. In any event, it looks like PlayerUnknown Productions is certainly off to a promising start.
