Developer PlayerUnknown, famous forPlayerUnknown Battlegrounds, which helped revolutionize the now iconicbattle royale genre, has remained relatively inactive until their recent announcement of two upcoming titles ingrained deeply into AI technology and machine learning.
One of the new titles,Preface: Undiscovered World, is nowavailable on Steamin early access. Although it is less of a complete game and more of a glorified tech demo, it showcases the new technology they hope to utilize in their more fully fledged upcoming survival game,Prologue: Go Wayback.
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Although both of these games feel a lot like tech demos, to be fair, the primary goal paints them as building blocks for PlayerUnknown’s potential projects, with the games providing instant feedback on the team’s efforts.
Thecoinciding video"What we’ve been up to at PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions" supports this and provides insight into the two projects. In the video, Brendan Greene, the creator ofPUBG, describes the goals they hope to achieve for PlayerUnknown Productions' future.
Preface: Undiscovered World, the early access title now playable, allows players to explore procedure-generated worlds with incredible scope.The description on the Steam page itself describes the generated content as an “Earth-scale world.”
Although this game provides a fascinating insight intoprocedural world mapping, with realistic biomes and topography creation, the real shining achievements are in the more fully fledged upcoming experiencePrologue: Go Wayback.
Prologueappears to be a traditional and basicsurvival game.It hassome essential survival mechanics and a goal of journeying to the other side of the map.The most notable aspect seems to be the focus on how weather and environments directly affect player exploration.
Alexander Helliwell, a senior artist at PlayerUnknown Productions, described in the video many of the unique key features they’re planning for weather inPrologue: Go Wayback.
“It’s not just an aesthetic thing… suddenly now the environment gets wet, so the terrain becomes slippery, mud forms, rivers go up. We’re thinking of like, what are all the repercussions of that, and how it can affect the player’s survival.”
The fun inPrologueseems similar to titles likeDeath Stranding, where the enjoyment comes from finding your own way through an unfriendly world where the natural elements are as much of a danger as anything else.
The Future Of PlayerUnknown Productions
Even though these two games have many interesting features that utilize new technology in notable ways, there still doesn’t appear to be much “game” here to interact with.But that’s definitely what PlayerUknown is going for, with these games acting as stepping stones to their future.
These games are positioned as tests for user feedback.The developers can collect player feedback and analyze statistics and information within the games themselves to determine what decisions they need to make to improve them overall.
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PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds creator Brendan Greene has high hopes for the future of this technology. In the video presentation, he discussed how much player feedback for these projects means to him.
I want to get our tech into the hands of the people out there to help us form what this tech will become.
The future of these titles is likely aproject titled Artemis, something Greene and PlayerUnknown Productions teased many years back as the goal they are striving towards.
Something to note is that Artimus had many Metaverse and NFT undertones back in the day. But these new showcases do not mention these facets, leading us to believe they are hopefully leaving all of that in the past.
If you’re interested, we recommend checking out these projects on Steam. Although it feels like just a start for PlayerUnknown productions, we’re overall surprised by what they’ve shown, and envision the potential this tech might bring for their future projects.
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