Brendan Greene, more commonly known as PLAYERUNKNOWN, has dropped a lot of announcements at the PC Gaming Show Most Wanted 2025. To start with, his company has released a free tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World on Steam. This demo is meant to showcase the in-house Melba engine that PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions has been developing. Greene said in a statement:
In Preface, users can witness an Earth-scale world generated in real-time by our machine learning agents directly on their GPU. This digital planet is still quite empty for now, but every person who enters it and shares their feedback contributes to its future development.
The studio also launched the Steam page for their first actual game, the single player survival open world title Prologue: Go Wayback!, which will allow the development team to test the machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology, enabling the instant creation of millions of maps.
In Prologue: A Way Back, players will explore a detailed world where emergent systems influence gameplay. They’ll face unpredictable weather events and ever-changing landscapes as they attempt to escape the untamed wilderness.
A series of playtests should start soon, with the objective of launching the game on Steam Early Access in Q2 of 2025.
Lastly, PLAYERUNKNOWN outlined his vision for the final game in this slate, codenamed Artemis, a massive multiplayer sandbox game.
My vision for Artemis is challenging, but we plan to take it one step at a time, and the three games aim to give us a solid tech foundation on which to scale up. After Prologue, two more games are planned for release in the coming years, each addressing critical technical challenges that will bring the studio closer to the final product. With Prologue, we aim to engage players and introduce them to the emergent mechanics and expansive worlds we’re developing.
Last we heard about Artemis, PLAYERUNKNOWN said it would be ‘planet-sized’. That was over three years ago, so things might have changed, but it definitely sounds like the goal is still to make an absolutely massive world.
