PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions has released the first gameplay trailer for its second project, the single-player open world survival game Prologue: Go Wayback. The Amsterdam-based developer also revealed that it will be available in early access starting this Summer for the rather low price of $20, which will not be increased after the end of the early access phase (estimated to be around a year).
In the game, players are dropped into a vast and wild landscape, equipped with just an old map and the basic tools to stay alive. The mission is simple: reach the weather station, but how to get there depends entirely on the player.
The world is dynamic and unpredictable. The weather can change at a moment's notice, forcing players to adapt to fierce storms and freezing temperatures. Gathering resources, finding shelter, and foraging for food will be essential. Extreme weather conditions can affect the character's stats. Items and even buildings found along the way can be repaired. Additionally, each playthrough will be completely different since it is generated by the studio's machine-learning technology.
We recently interviewed Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene himself, diving deeply into his 10-plus-year plan to get the metaverse right. Prologue: Go Wayback follows the tech demo Preface: Undiscovered World (which is live now on Steam) and is a mid-step toward the final, full-fledged planet-sized massively multiplayer game codenamed Project Artemis. Unlike Preface and Artemis, it is made with Unreal Engine, albeit mixed with the studio's in-house custom machine learning terrain generation technology.
In the aforementioned interview, Greene said about Prologue: Go Wayback:
Prologue is tackling the terrain where we generate new terrains every playthrough by using our machine learning tech. That'll help us prove out and mature the ML tech. Then, when we go to game two, which is hopefully on our own engine, we can have that ML tech matured, go bigger, and keep scaling up. That's the intention for Prologue. It's quite a simple game. It's not my next opus, but it serves a purpose, which is that of a testbed for our ML tech.
I still want to make a great single player experience and I'm excited about emergent gameplay in a single player world, kind of like Don't Starve and these games that are unique in every playthrough. Hopefully, we can create an 8x8 world that looks pretty good. Having a unique world every time, I think, gives us something interesting to play with.
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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