Playerunknown Productions, the studio founded by PUBG creator Brendan Greene, has announced a massive new three-game initiative.
These are three separate games that you’ll be able to play, which will culminate in the studio’s new massive multiplayer sandbox experience, currently titled Artemis. It’s an interesting approach that means you’ll have something to play while waiting for that final piece.
The first game is called Prologue: Go Wayback! – which is described as a “single-player open-world emergent survival game.” It’s pretty clear Greene and his studio are using their expertise from PUBG to create similar experiences.
Prologue will apparently use in-house “machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology” to create millions of different maps. Past that, we don’t know much about the actual minute-to-minute gameplay of Prologue, outside its survival focus. The studio plans to do a series of playtests in the near future that will lead up to the game releasing in Early Access on Steam in Q2 2025.
But, there is something you’ll be able to play today as Playerunknown is also releasing a free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World. This will showcase the studio’s in-house “Melba” engine, letting you see how it generates worlds. Here’s an overview of the tech demo’s key features. There’s also a development roadmap the studio has released.
- Earth-scale world generated in real-time by machine learning agents directly on your GPU (no cloud required).
- Traverse a dynamically created environment and contribute valuable feedback for future development.
- Waypoint creation to mark points of interest.
- Postcard feature to document your journey.
- Local simulation showcased like never before
Of course, as previously stated all of this is supposed to culminate in Artemis, but we don’t know anything more about the other games releasing before then.
“My vision for Artemis is challenging, but we plan to take it one step at a time and the three games aim to give us a solid tech foundation on which to scale up,” says Greene “After Prologue, two more games are planned for release in the coming years, each addressing critical technical challenges that will bring the studio closer to the final product.”
