Brendan Green – better known as PlayerUnknown, the creator of PUBG – is back with new game Prologue: Go Wayback!, an ambitious open-world survival game that promises a vast photoreal, unpredictable environment to explore.
Spanning 64km2 of procedurally generated terrain Greene admits his new game won't be for everyone, in fact, he expects players to hate it. Prologue is one of a number of new games, like WILL: Follow the Light's use of UE5 and Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream's use of MetaHuman Creator, that aim for new levels of realism.
Speaking to our sister site PC Gamer, Brendan said: "If it elicits a reaction – that's all I want." As a fan of punishing games like Doom, Greene is a dev who embraces a challenge and wants players to do the same. Prologue is an extension of this idea: “I want to make a space that is hard and difficult,” he said, because players deep down want a challenge.
PUBG creator isn't new to ambitious ideas. We recently covered his new game engine Preface: Undiscovered World, which lets game devs create 'an Earth-scale world generated in real time'. It's a photoreal world builder that has Unreal Engine in its sights, and Prologue is another tease of the kind of tech Brendan is promising.
In this sense, Prologue is more than just another survival game, it's a prototype of the dev's larger vision – to offer a realistic sandbox ripe for experimentation. In the game players have one goal, to reach a point on the map with minimal tools while fighting and surviving the forces of nature. Prologue features dynamic, ever-changing weather conditions. Weather in the game is the enemy, as he told PC Gamer: "It’s a constant threat, rather than something you can predict easily. It just feels fairer.”
Between Prologue and the previously released Preface (available on Steam), there's a common thread driving the releases of Brendan and PlayerUnknown Productions – both are ambitious projects that enable the creation of large, living worlds where immersion is important.
Brendan may want you to hate his new game, kind of, but Prologue is clearly not playing by the same rules as other games, and points to a future of game tech where truly believable worlds are a reality, something other engines, like Unreal Engine 5, are aiming for too.
What do you think of Prologue: Go Wayback? Are photoreal game worlds now a reality? Let us know in the comments below.
