The Creator of Battle Royales Wants to Reshape Gaming — Again
Before Fortnite took over the gaming world with celebrity skins and virtual concerts, it gained notoriety as a breakout in the battle royale genre. But Epic Game’s soon-to-be cultural juggernaut wasn’t exactly a pioneer — it was more like a copycat — with the “battle royale” elements added to the game after it initially launched as a cooperative survival game.
In reality, it was the work of Brendan Greene (otherwise called “PlayerUnknown”) that kick-started the battle royale craze, and with it, the success of Fortnite and its many imitators. Nowadays, everything from Call of Duty to Tetris has a version retrofitted to the trend; everyone wants a piece of the pie.
More from Rolling Stone
Greene is credited with starting the battle royale subgenre with DayZ: Battle Royale, a modified version of DayZ (which itself was a mod of military simulator Arma 2). His addition to the mod came out in 2013, but his first fully original standalone game was 2017’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (more commonly known as PUBG).
In it, 100 players parachute into a decrepit Soviet-era town and its surrounding countryside before they scavenge for weapons and gear then fight to the death — mechanics which are now genre staples. Combined with its mobile version, which has a strong esports scene, it has reportedly sold over 75 million copies and earned over $17 billion, making it one of the most successful games of all time.
But Greene’s new game, Prologue: Go Wayback!, is nothing like PUBG.
Prologue was first announced in 2019 with a cryptic trailer that showed a first-person view of a storm crashing through a dark forest. Then there were two years of radio silence, after which Greene split with PUBG publisher Krafton to spin up his own studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. And yet, without the name of PlayerUnknown behind it, no one would ever know the two games came from the same mind.
Another trailer shown in December 2024 gives a more clear look at what Prologue actually is and why it’s being made. It’s a survival game where emergent weather interacts realistically with the environment to create challenging terrain for players to navigate. It also functions as a testing ground for the technology that will power PlayerUnknown Productions’ magnum opus, a “3D Internet” with massive worlds for players to make their own. But how does it feel to play?
At a recent in-person preview event at the developer’s headquarters in Amsterdam, Rolling Stone spent several hours playing Prologue and speaking with Greene and members of his team about the studio’s big plans for the future, namely their ambitious 15-year roadmap for a utopian reimagining of what large, open-world games can be.
What is Prologue: Go Wayback! about?
Rather than dropping 100 competitors into a single map as PUBG does, Prologue puts a lone player in a wooden cabin in a randomized taiga forest eight square kilometers in size. It’s got a wide-river, deep valleys, and steep mountains, all based on the real-life border of the Czech Republic and Germany — “Swiss Bohemia,” as Greene describes it. The Irish developer seems to have a fascination with Eastern Europe’s beautiful and sometimes harsh environments.
Trekking to a far off weather station is the closest thing Prologue has to an objective, but the team emphasizes that they don’t really care what people choose to do in the game. Players will need to search cabins and the forest for enough food, water, and warm clothing to help them survive the journey. It’s a surprisingly difficult challenge, but a welcome one in an age where video games often go far too easy on players and prevent them from making any mistakes.
“It’s not meant to be a game that holds your hand,” Greene says. “Learn the mechanics, get better, and sometimes, yeah, you’ll get 200 meters from the end and you’ll fall down a cliff and you’ll hate yourself. But you’ll try again because next time you won’t stand so close to the cliff edge.”
Prologue’s randomized terrain is the entire reason for its existence. PlayerUnknown Productions is aiming to create Artemis, an open-source game that will function like a “3D Internet.” But that game is at least ten to 15 years off according to Greene and his team. In the meantime, they’re working on smaller games like Prologue that will function as tech demos and lay the foundation for Artemis. The specific goal of Prologue is to test the machine learning terrain generation that will be needed to create the worlds players will inhabit in Artemis.
“I don’t look at it as entering the survival genre,” Greene says. “I’m using the survival game mode because when we started this and thought about, ‘How do we leverage real-time generated worlds?’ I thought a survival game mode was the one that made the most sense. It was easy to understand, simple mechanics that are well-worn in a lot of games so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
Prologue: Go Wayback! can broadly be defined as a survival game, though, and while a lot of it will be familiar to fans of the genre — such as the need to manage hunger, thirst, and temperature to stave off death — the game’s punishing difficulty and unpredictable emergent weather effects make it a unique experience.
When the player dies, their save file is deleted and they have to start from scratch on a newly generated map. There are over 4.2 billion iterations of this landscape, so the journey will always be different and it’s unlikely two players will ever tread the same ground.
Although the map changes, the player is always a woman called Lucy, a choice which was important to Greene because he wants women to have more representation in games. The team teases that who she is will become more relevant when the game’s early access period is over. “It’s a thing for later,” says Scott Davidson, the creative director, and Greene says that there’s an “overarching narrative” that will tie all the games the studio is making together.
What is the machine learning technology being tested?
Obviously, human developers couldn’t hand-craft the billions of maps Lucy will traverse, so how are they made? Prologue is the result of the machine learning algorithm being developed by PlayerUnknown Productions. Machine learning falls under the broad umbrella of AI, but AI is a term that was used in the video game industry for decades to describe non-player character behavior and create randomized maps before it became more infamous after being adopted in large language models like ChatGPT or generative image tools like Midjourney.
“We use machine learning trained on real Earth data,” Green explains. The data used is from Natural Earth’s open source database, so it doesn’t have the same ethical baggage a lot of generative AI projects that are accused of stealing other people’s intellectual property does.
One of the most popular games in the world already can create massive, unique worlds: Minecraft. The machine learning team says the 16-year-old game does it so well because of its blocky aesthetic. “Your brain fills in the gaps between the blocks,” explains Joey Faulkner, a senior machine learning researcher. But Prologue — and Artemis after it — will be going for a more photorealistic approach, so older techniques won’t work as well.
“With PCG [procedural computer generation], you’re writing a bunch of rules,” says Patrick McCaffrey, senior machine learning researcher. “Whereas machine learning, we’re trying to achieve the same thing except it learns the rules for itself.”
At the moment, this part of the team is just in charge of the terrain placement. It’s the game designers who make the world feel alive by implementing random weather effects that interact in realistic ways over different types of terrain.
Earth turns to mud in the rain and causes the player character’s feet to get stuck so she moves at a fraction of her usual speed. Rain also causes the river banks to rise and rock faces to become slippery. At one point during the preview, when trying to find a safe path into a valley below, she slid down toward the edge of a cliff, barely managing to stop in time to prevent a fatal fall. Next time, don’t stand so close to the edge.
The end goal, though, is to be able to implement all this technology at any scale so that players in Artemis can explore huge, unique worlds.
What is Artemis?
“The aim is to get to Artemis,” Greene says. “These other games are just stepping stones getting us there. Solve a problem, great, move on.”
Greene has a three-game plan, and each will test some core component of Artemis. Prologue is testing the terrain generation. Game two will be more of a first-person shooter but with added “unit generation,” says Greene. A game where factions fight and players control them like a commander. The goal is to “lock down ML [machine learning] animation, like texturing, at scale.” Game three will be more like a cross between Minecraft and Civilization, with building and the ability to take over towns and trade with other players.
Once Artemis is fully realized, Greene says it will be “a giant shared social space,” where players can “fly around and see what people are creating.” His hope is that players will make worlds and experiences within them, like the early days of the Internet where anyone with some HTML knowledge could make a website for whatever silly or serious purpose they wanted. But Artemis will be a “3D Internet” where “every world’s a page,” Greene says, fully open source with all the technology used to build it available for anyone to use how they see fit.
This sounds a lot like what companies promised the Metaverse would be before giving up on the idea in favor of pursuing generative AI. The term Metaverse “comes with bad connotations,” Greene says. “Facebook changing its name to Meta, we’re still calling it Facebook. They build content bubbles. And they build funnels in which to sell you stuff. That’s not the Internet.”
Artemis has to be “fair and equitable,” says Greene. “Let’s give the same opportunities to everyone, [the] ability to earn wealth or earn worth or get reward for your work on the network.”
It’s a very utopian idea, one which everyone on the team seems to believe in fully. “I was studying black holes,” says Noel Lopez Gonzaga, lead AI researcher, and now he’s creating a new digital frontier.
Since the studio won’t be licensing out the technology it creates, it plans to make money through the sales of these smaller games such as Prologue for now. Once Artemis is live, it’ll take a cut of any transaction made between players. So, if someone decides to build a town and offer their construction services to others or charge rent, PlayerUnknown Procutions will get a little kickback.
Greene isn’t sure what sort of money will be used in-game, but he wants an economy that’s stable and can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world. “It has to have the same access for kids in Africa and kids in California,” he says. “We’ll probably test digital economy and marketplace and ownership in game two.” He won’t implement this at scale until the economy is “bomb-proof.” Is any economy “bomb-proof,” though?
Why should players care about a stepping stone?
As for Prologue itself, it feels like more than just a stepping stone. Although the preview build is still several months away from launching into early access, it’s a compelling game to play — the generated environment itself is what’s trying to kill Lucy and it makes for a formidable foe.
“Trying” may be too active a verb, however. The world is simply indifferent to Lucy’s existence. She starts out in a cabin equipped with some survival tools like a map and compass, flint and steel, and some basic supplies. The station always spawns directly ahead of the front door, but there’s no indicator that shows Lucy’s real-time location, and the station’s antenna can be obscured by tall trees and imposing mountain ridges if the player spawns in a valley instead of on top of a hill.
The compass can be adjusted so that players always know which direction the weather station is in, but this requires aligning it with the sight line in the lid and then manually shifting its dial so that north and a black line on the face overlay when it’s being pointed the right way. Requiring players to know real-world map and compass techniques is a bigger ask than most games demand, but the skill may come in handy if a player ever finds themself lost in the woods.
It may be tempting to skip these steps and simply head out the front door and stroll toward the weather station, but that will most-likely result in death. While thirst and hunger are relatively simple to manage, the cold is a harder enemy to fight.
When gorgeous clouds form suddenly, they drop the temperature by blocking out the sun or foreshadow the arrival of a biting blizzard. Other cabins and temporary shelters are marked on the map, so players can get Lucy to cover if they know where they are, but getting caught out in the open in the middle of a storm happens frequently and it’s hard to survive. Players can also gather materials to build a fire if shelter is far away, but they’ll need kindling, fuel, and the flint and steel from the starting cabin. Inventory space is scarce, so this is really a last resort, as most of Lucy’s backpack should be filled with food and water.
To add to the troubles, night time is truly pitch-black — even a torch only allows the player to see a few feet in front of them. Blizzards and fog reduce visibility even further, so sprinting once the sun goes down is dangerous as it’s impossible to see if a drop is ahead.
Additionally, tools like the map and compass are unreadable at night. It’s possible to turn so that the moon is at Lucy’s back and its silver light illuminates the map long enough to discern their location and find a cabin to take shelter in. But, if there’s cloud cover, Lucy will likely freeze to death, lost in the woods.
The danger night poses makes daybreak more welcome than it is in most games. “When the sun comes up, you’re in it there, you feel it,” Davidson says proudly. “We just need to supplement a lot of that with the little things.”
Moments like these, where multiple systems within Prologue combine to crank up the difficulty help it shine and are what will have hardcore players coming back for more punishment.
What’s the verdict?
That’s the plan, anyway. In reality, the preview build was poorly balanced and filled with glitches. Once a player finds a few pieces of warm clothing, even the most bone-chilling wind could be shrugged off without a second thought. Hunger and thirst then became the only obstacles to overcome, but soda cans aren’t working properly. They’re always half full and can be drunk from repeatedly, keeping Lucy satiated no matter how far she treks.
The most frustrating issue is how often the player can encounter a game-breaking bug, such as falling through the map and becoming stuck under the terrain (or the game simply crashing), so it’s hard to recommend Prologue in its current state. Hopefully the early-access build the studio is aiming to launch sometime this year will be in better shape and the game will keep improving before the full 1.0 launch.
The game will be in early access for around a year, and the team will be taking a lot of player feedback during this time, so the final product will likely look very different to the preview build.
Despite its problems, Prologue: Go Wayback! is a very moreish game. Each death inspires a thought of “one more try,” over and over until players finally reach the weather station. During the preview event, all attendees opted to stay at the PlayerUnknown Productions office and play it for an extra couple of hours, choosing to wander the machine-generated forest rather than going out and exploring Amsterdam. When Artemis is live in 15 years, will we forgo the real world for its digitized ones, too?
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.