Brendan Greene's PlayerUnknown Productions Unveils Huge Game Projects

PlayerUnknown Productions surfaced after years of development with a three-game plan to allow this founder Brendan Greene refers to the new 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 a hundred people in a smaller and smaller battle space until only one person remains. no one as winner.

Greene first created a “mod” called DayZ in the Arma universe. He then teamed up with South Korea's Krafton to create PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, disrupted shooters like Call of Duty, and sold more than 80 million copies. Krafton went public and Greene became rich because of it. This gave him the money to work on something truly ambitious.

Then he leaves alone to create a new startup, PlayerUnknown Productionsin 2021 to create a game survival world that felt a lot like a metaverse. Then Greene gave us a reveal your ambitions. He was going to create a world called Prologue that would have a huge area of ​​around 100 square kilometers. This world would be a test where players would enter the world and attempt to survive until they exit the world at a given location. It would be different every time they went in there.

Greene has now released a video that describes her intentions in a more concrete way. Prologue has a real preview in the video and the world looks very realistic, with trees and grass swaying in the wind. And it's still a huge world, shaped with machine learning and AI tools.

Prologue is an emerging single-player open world game in the survival genre and it now has a Steam page.

Second, there will be a preview of the company's free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World, showcasing its in-house Melba engine. This demo aims to provide users with a glimpse of the innovative technology that will power subsequent titles in the series, and eventually Project Artemis.

Project Artemis is the final large-scale project in the series. As described in the past, Greene envisions this as an Earth-sized world where players can come and create their own gaming experiences in different parts of the world. We don't use the word metaverse that much anymore, but that's what it looks like.

Here are the links for the Prologue and the Preface. They're not online yet, but will be by the time this story comes out.

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 took him three years to get it into a solid, groundbreaking form. The company can now start sharing it and receiving feedback “to make it into something really different.”

“When I started, I was trying to create an open world experience that was broader than most people's, and we tried to plan a few years out and we found a way to make that happen,” Greene said . “We basically reinvented how you create these worlds using machine learning technology, using natural data from the earth to generate” the terrain.

The company is now ready to test this terrain, which will form the basis of the larger worlds. He explained that the team divided the trip into three stages. The first task was to fill the world's terrain. The second was to fill that terrain with lots of interaction when scaling. And then thirdly, the goal was to get a group of these players out into the world, Greene said.

The company will continue to improve Prologue with its current game engine and then move it to the next version of its game engine.

Prologue started as an experiment in Unity, then moved to Unreal a few years ago and the tools proved to be a solid foundation. The proprietary technology will eventually be able to generate a world containing millions or even billions of objects, with the help of machine learning.

“It's more of a large scale and, again, machine learning is very effective because it captures the patterns that we teach it,” Greene said.

The physics will be realistic. If the ground gets wet, the terrain becomes muddy and slippery and rivers can form, which will impact players trying to survive in a wilderness. That will make the game difficult, but he can't be unbeatable, Greene said.

“We find out what's fun, what's not, but ultimately it's about survival. I think the more we can test, the more feedback we can get from users or players, and that's one of the reasons we're going to offer early access,” Greene said. “The more we can actually engage with the community and get their feedback,” the more they 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 we build the engine allows us to scale toward large-scale agent interaction,” Greene said. “We have an Earth-scale planner with different biomes and some simple systems for you to explore.”

The company is working on two projects at once – one with Unreal and another with Melba – so as not to develop technology in isolation, CTO Laurent Gorga said in the video. Unreal and Prologue will generate a piece of the world. The preface will help achieve scale, and then Artemis will be the full expression of it.

“I want to get our technology into people's hands to help us realize what this technology will become,” Greene said. “This field technology is interesting, but I really need it, I want to leave it open. I want to leave it moddable.

Greene said it could take five or ten years, but Prologue could be available on Steam in the second quarter of next year.