While many consider Fortnite to be the pinnacle of the battle royale genre, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, developed by Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, was the first to bring mainstream attention to the format. Since then, Greene has formed his own studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, and today the team has announced a three-game plan for the future, which begins with Prologue: Go Wayback.
Prologue is described as a “single-player open-world emergent game within the survival genre,” which will incorporate a new “machine-learning-driven terrain-generation technology” developed by the team. This new tech will allow the game to create “millions” of maps at once, though the specifics of how the tech works were not disclosed. Prologue: Go Wayback is set to launch in Steam Early Access in Q2 2025.
The end goal of the three-game plan is Project Artemis, though little is known about what Greene and his team have planned. “My vision for Artemis is challenging, but we plan to take it one step at a time,” Greene says, “and the three games aim to give us a solid tech foundation on which to scale up.”
Along with Prologue and Project Artemis’s announcement comes Preface: Undiscovered World, which is a tech demo intended to showcase Melba, PlayerUnknown Productions’ new in-game development engine. Preface is in addition to the main three-game plan, and Greene says that the demo will generate an “Earth-sized planet” in real time, with players able to give feedback while exploring. Preface: Undiscovered World is available now for free on Steam.
As for Greene’s previous project, PlayerUnknown’s Battleground is available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and mobile devices.