Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown, the mind behind the battle royale genre, has revealed three new projects from his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. These range from a free tech demo to a survival game and culminate in the ambitious Project Artemis.
Greene, known for his work on PUBG, DayZ, and H1Z1, established PlayerUnknown Productions to explore new frontiers in game development. The studio’s latest announcements offer a glimpse into their vision for the future of gaming, centered around a new game engine and machine learning technology.
Preface: Undiscovered World – A Glimpse into the Future
The first project is Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo showcasing the Melba game engine. This engine will power all future PlayerUnknown Productions titles. Preface offers players a unique experience: exploring a vast, Earth-scale world generated in real-time by machine learning agents directly on their GPUs.
“In Preface, users can witness an Earth-scale world generated in real-time by our machine learning agents directly on their GPU,” Greene explains. “This digital planet is still quite empty for now, but every person who enters it and shares their feedback contributes to its future development.”
A screenshot from the tech demo Preface: Undiscovered World.
Prologue: Go Wayback! – Survival in a Dynamic World
The learnings from Preface will directly inform the development of Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player survival game. This title will leverage machine learning for terrain generation, creating dynamic and unpredictable weather conditions that players must navigate as they attempt to reach a weather station and call for help. Prologue: Go Wayback! is slated for early access release on Steam in Q2 2025, with playtests scheduled before launch.
Project Artemis – The Ultimate Goal
Both Preface: Undiscovered World and Prologue: Go Wayback! serve as stepping stones toward the ambitious Project Artemis. This project represents the culmination of PlayerUnknown Productions’ efforts, envisioned as a massive multiplayer sandbox experience. While details remain scarce, Greene acknowledges the challenging nature of his vision for Artemis. A release window for Project Artemis has not yet been announced.
Conclusion: A New Era for PlayerUnknown
With these three projects, PlayerUnknown Productions is setting the stage for a new era in gaming, pushing the boundaries of technology and player experience. While Project Artemis remains a distant goal, Preface and Prologue offer tangible glimpses into the studio’s innovative approach to game development. The future looks promising for fans of PlayerUnknown’s unique vision.
