PlayerUnknown Might Be The James Halliday We've Been Waiting For

Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene published a video this week speaking about his next "game." The game is currently called Prologue. It's not clear at the moment if this is to be the final name of the game, or if this is sort of akin to calling the game "Demo". For now, the important bit is the idea that Greene effectively invented the gamified universe of Battle Royale (inspired by the film series), and he's on to his next project with a new game studio where a new experience is about to exist.

Greene speaks in the video you'll be able to see below this paragraph about how the next major gaming experience will be "hundreds of kilometers" large with "thousands of players interacting." He's aiming to create an open world inspired by Markus [Persson, re: Minecraft], Garry [Newman, re: Garry's Mod], and Shawn [Green, re: DOOM].

The key – or one of the main keys, here, according to Greene is getting machines to assist in generating realistic, massive open world environments. We're talking machine learning and artificially intelligent content generation. We might be talking Ready Player One, but very, very early on in the process before OASIS.

The first public part of this gaming experience is Prologue, a sort of early showing that'll also inform the people at PlayerUnknown Studios about how the rest of the experience should be made, and what it will be. Greene says the end product will have "massive scale" – he says this more than once.

The game Prologue was described by Greene as having the task to "make your way across a one time generated wilderness and use found tools and gathered resources to survive on a journey where harsh weather is your constant foe."

I'd like to say, at this point, it's exceedingly refreshing to see a major developer that saw massive success with a game centered on weapons make a switch to an experience whose most major adversary isn't another human or monster.

This game – at least the demo Prologue – will have "no guns, no guidance, no path for you to follow. Just a world, a spot on a map to reach, and the tools you need to get there."

Prologue will be a "tech demo" that'll allow gamers to experience an early iteration of the studio's terrain generation tool. It'll be a pay-what-you-want sort of experience, and it will be released soon-ish. Stick around as we learn more!