A few days ago, PLAYERUNKNOWN announced his departure from Krafton to focus on the development of Prologue, a free-to-play survival sandbox experience that PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions will use to test his dream to create a truly massive game.
Speaking to GamesBeat, Brendan 'PLAYERUNKNOWN' Greene admitted Prologue will likely be boring.
I think it’ll be quite boring. Light fires, board up windows, keep yourself warm against the constant storm where cold weather will knock you out. But again, it’s more to show a consistent world with logical points on it where you can do things, and this is systemic gameplay. We’re using Prologue as a testbed for the game elements of the world. We can test out an electrical system. We can put in a better animation system. All these things will be spec’d out first in Prologue, made to work, and then when we come to Artemis we at least have the logic figured out and we can start programming it into the engine. It’s like what ArmA was for battle royale. It was a place for me to test, iterate, get a final game mode, and then be able to say, ‘Okay, it works.’ That’s what we want to do with Prologue.
It'll be a tech demo for the developers' benefit, essentially. PLAYERUNKNOWN said that while Prologue's size will be between 32 or 64 square kilometers, the goal for the Artemis, the actual game project, is to be planet-sized.
Artemis probably won’t be worlds generated with runtime. Prologue will be, every time you press play you’ll get a new world. It will hopefully be a different enough terrain that it should feel different every time. With Artemis, we won’t have that. We’ll probably have static worlds that you can come and enter. Prologue is on a much smaller scale as well. It’s maybe 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers or 64 kilometers by 64 kilometers, whereas Artemis will be planet-scale, hopefully. A smaller planet, but that kind of scale.
We want to give people a new place to live, because this one has some issues.
Needless to say, this will be quite the effort for the game studio, particularly since they'll ultimately have to populate this huge world with hundreds of thousands of players. PLAYERUNKNOWN mentioned the multiplayer issue will be tackled last, as network technologies improve with every passing year.
It'll be a long while before we play Artemis, but Brendan Greene certainly is shooting for the stars. Stay tuned on Wccftech to follow the project's development.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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