PlayerUnknown on Its Projects for Creating Earth-Sized Open Worlds

PUBG creator Brendan Greene, best known as PlayerUnknown, has shared updates on his new projects, Prologue: Go Wayback! and Preface: Undiscovered World.

Preface and Prologue are two different attempts to work on the technology for the studio's game Artemis. PlayerUnknown Productions CTO Laurent Gorga said: "I don't believe in technology developed in a vacuum."

Prologue: Go Wayback! is based on Unreal Engine, and Preface: Undiscovered World is a free tech demo of a new game engine that lets players generate and explore Earth-sized worlds. "This is why we have Prologue, which is on Unreal Engine, but we are using part of our technology to generate a world. It's why we have Preface, which is more about attacking the scale, so we attack the problem from both ends," Laurent Gorga says.

Brendan Greene explained the approach to creating open worlds with the said technologies: "We essentially reinvented how you create these worlds, using machine learning technology using natural Earth data to generate these worlds from latent space. And that's what our breakthrough was – we discovered terrain and the uprising of terrain within latent space."

He said that the creators divided the process into three stages: the first is building the terrain on which we play or have the experience; the second is filling that terrain with lots of interaction when scaling up; the third is adding players onto the world.

Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player open-world emergent game within the survival genre, will be available in early access on Steam in Q2 2025. Preface, which allows for building an "Earth-scale planet with some various biomes and some simple systems to allow you to explore it," is now available on Steam. 

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