PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, more commonly known as PUBG (or Game for Peace in China) is already one of the most successful and influential games ever made just four years after release. Its director Brendan Greene, a former DJ and web designer from Ireland, is credited with launching the entire battle royale genre, directly inspiring what you now know as Fortnite, CoD: Warzone, Apex Legends and more.
But this past week, he announced that he’d left the Korean company whose work on his battle royale vision propelled him to fame to build a studio all his own — and late Thursday, he revealed what to expect from his next project.
It’s called Prologue, and it will be a pay-what-you-want tech demo designed to illustrate the kinds of games that Greene wants to build next: “We want to create realistic sandbox worlds on a scale that’s seldom attempted, worlds hundreds of kilometers across with thousands of players interacting, exploring and creating,” he says.
Greene says his new team has built a neural network that can generate “massive realistic open worlds at runtime — each and every time you press play,” calling it a “breakthrough,” and that Prologue will be “a simple introduction to an early iteration of our technology.”
Here’s his full description of Prologue:
You’ll need to find your way across a runtime generated wilderness and use found tools and gathered resources to survive on a journey where harsh weather is your constant foe. There will be no guidance, no path for you to follow, just a world, a spot on the map to reach, and the tools you need to get there.
There’s no word on when we should expect Prologue yet, but Greene gave an exclusive interview to VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi. It should go live at 8:45AM on Saturday, according to the publication.
The company that Greene left has a stake in his new company too, VentureBeat reports. Krafton (formerly known as PUBG Corp, and before that Bluehole Studio) is also working on its next game, a fantasy epic currently known as “Project Windless” that’s based on Korean folklore.
