PlayerUnknown Productions today announced its upcoming emergent single-player survival experience, Prologue: Go Wayback, is now available in open beta on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
Starting today, players can dive into a full version of the game in development and experience its unforgiving wilderness, dynamic weather systems, and hardcore survival mechanics across billions of worlds generated by the latest advances in the studio’s in-house technology.
Check out the Open Beta trailer here. It will ultimately be a $20 game.
Speaking about the decision to first launch into open beta, PlayerUnknown’s founder Brendan Greene said in a statement, “After running playtests with our Discord community over the last 6 months, and receiving some fantastic feedback, we decided to take the time to add more ways to explore our generated worlds based on our community’s suggestions.”
He added, “We have a great survival experience, with millions of maps for players to explore in the open beta, and over the coming months leading up to our early access launch, we plan to add more features to further customize your preferred way to play.”
The back story for PlayerUnknown
Greene, who pioneered battle royale in gaming, has the ambition to outdo his last project, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, which sold more than 90 million copies or so.
Amsterdam-based PlayerUnknown Productions has been working on it for years, and now the firm has in-game footage in its latest trailer. It gives an extended look at Prologue’s core gameplay where players will be able to explore a vast, ever-changing wilderness while balancing adventure and discovery with intricate survival systems such as caloric intake, body temperature regulation, and shelter discovery and maintenance.
Prologue: Go Wayback! is the first step in a new journey for PlayerUnkown Productions which will culminate in the studio’s ultimate goal: project ‘Artemis’. Prologue combines Unreal Engine with custom machine-learning (ML) to generate maps and can generate millions of different maps with realistic terrain for players to explore.
An evolution of this technology will be a highly specialized in-house game engine, ‘Melba’ which will be incorporated in the two games to follow Prologue, including a yet-to-be-announced title and project ‘Artemis’ — a massive sandbox world designed for emergent interactions, player creativity, and ultimate freedom.
Founded in 2021 by Brendan Greene, PlayerUnknown Productions is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactive entertainment.
The Prologue: Go Wayback experience
Prologue: Go Wayback! is a single-player emergent game and showcase for PlayerUnknown Productions’ ML (machine learning)-powered terrain generation technology. It continues Greene’s exploration of emergent gameplay, offering a world where no two journeys are the same.
Prologue: Go Wayback is an emergent survival experience where every journey is unique.
Players can explore a 64 kilometer squared map based on the Czech Bohemia region, generated locally on their system every time they press play.
Players will need to learn how to navigate and reach the Weather Tower, using just the tools at their disposal. Chart a path from shelter to shelter using a map and compass, and navigate the terrain by using natural landmarks and features like rivers, valleys, and mountain ridges.
I started playing a couple of times and am getting a feel for the experience. You start inside a cabin and find basic necessities in it like flint for starting fires, warm clothes, a flashlight and some food. But the cabin was no place to stay as it had broken windows and could not offer great shelter during bad weather.
I ventured out and saw a cabin nearby and went toward it. Along the way, I saw a lake freeze over and then it started raining. I went inside and scavenged some supplies, but much of the canned goods were rotten. As the rain turned into a torrent, I realized that I would not have lasted very long at all in the outdoors. The conditions are realistic, but we’ll find out soon enough if people really like this kind of ultimate survival test.
You can manage your body temperature by finding better clothes and by building fires to stay warm. Forage for edible food and seek out sources of drinkable water to survive the path you choose on your way to find the Weather Tower.
There are some things that could use fixing. It’s not so easy to grab things, in part because, like in the real world, some things are very close to each other. Half the time I tried to grab something, it didn’t work. The inventory of things you can carry is very small. A hammer that you can use for a variety of tasks takes up 10% or so of the inventory of your backpack. It could also use game controller support. I assume these things will get fixed over time.
The scope of Prologue: Go Wayback
Go Wayback is powered by the studio’s research into machine learning (ML) models to
generate base terrain maps in Unreal Engine 5, which are then populated procedurally with custom assets such as trees, rivers, rocks, cliffs, hills, and shelters. Our artists and designers utilise our in-house ML model to generate 64 kilometer-square maps that appear both natural and realistic.
The ML model is trained on publicly available open-source data and vetted to prevent the use of any copyrighted material.
The open beta will remain available until the launch of Early Access on Steam and Epic Games Store, and will be regularly updated with new features as we build towards the Early Access launch.
Players can join the official Discord to share feedback and sign up to help playtest upcoming features, such as a Map Editor that will allow players to create terrain from designs they can draw themselves, or import from images they can load into the Editor.
Key Features
● A New Map Every Time You Play: Explore vast, procedurally generated landscapes
created using our artist-guided ML generation system.
● Dynamic Weather System: Face powerful storms, freezing blizzards, rampaging
thunderstorms across an environment that can change at a moment’s notice.
● Emergent Player Freedom: No quest markers, no scripted path, and nobody to tell you
how to play. What you do is up to you.
● Realistic navigation: Use a compass, a map, natural landmarks, and your gut feeling.
You can learn to chart your path and navigate nature across a journey that is uniquely yours.
Another step towards Project Artemis
The launch of the Open Beta of Prologue: Go Wayback marks a significant step forward in the development of Project Artemis, PlayerUnknown Productions’ long-term mission to create and deliver a technology and platform that enables massive-scale creation and emergent play.
To produce the technology to power Project Artemis, the studio is developing its own in-house Melba engine, which can be explored in the continuously updated playable tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World.
As the first of three planned titles, Prologue: Go Wayback! is designed to be a standalone
single-player game experience built around the studio’s technological progress to create
realistic terrain generation at scale.
Amsterdam-based PlayerUnknown Productions’ future titles will solve other problems of creating massive online worlds at scale, and we invite the community to follow and build a journey towards that future together.