Snow starts to fall around me. It’s serene, but I know that in Prologue, the upcoming survival game from PlayerUnknown Productions, it signals my impending demise. A blizzard is fast approaching. My only hope is to find one of the cabins scrawled onto my map, and with more help from lady luck than my woeful orienteering skills, I find a little wooden sanctuary. Some of the windows are shattered, and the cupboards are bare except for a couple bags of rice and some tins of soup. Aside from the dim glow of a light bulb, it’s dark – I need my torch, which I just dropped with a mispress of a key. Disaster. But as the raging blizzard subsides, some more extreme weather begins to roll in. A thunderstorm, with crackles of lightning that illuminate the cabin for a brief moment. After a few flashes, I spot my torch and then gratefully reclaim it. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll make it to the end of this run.
Prologue excels at creating such moments. Ever since Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene, the creator of the iconic battle royale PUBG, unveiled his new studio and ambitious plan to create an open-source, moddable metaverse full of planet-sized worlds called Project Artemis, I’ve found it hard to fathom how it could be done and what it would look like. Prologue, his new survival game, is supposed to be the first major step towards it. If you were to peer over my shoulder and see me playing it during my visit to PP’s studio, you probably wouldn’t think it straight away.
This is a ‘simple’ survival game, even by PlayerUnknown Productions’ own admission. The early build I played was janky and contained a lot of bugs, including the internally infamous ‘lake house’, which sees your starting cabin spawn in the middle of a river. The visuals, especially while inside cabins, appear quite outdated too. It seems to be a long way from a building block for a revolutionary metaverse – it didn’t even immediately strike me as a good survival game, truth be told. But I gradually warmed to it.
Let’s start with its credentials as a survival experience. Despite its simplicity, Prologue is hardcore. It’s addictively grueling. A limited inventory and an intentionally clunky item-handling system demand your full focus. Unforgiving hunger and thirst meters will leave you in a constant state of nervousness. The prospect of a blizzard that will freeze you to death in a matter of minutes constantly looms over you. There are no objective markers, only a compass and a map to help guide you. The overarching goal sounds easy: travel from your starting cabin to the faint, blinking light atop a weather station tower. The journey, however, is far from straightforward.
The land you must traverse is not a bespoke, hand-crafted map. It is, in fact, the greatest component of Prologue, and the foundation for the huge worlds PlayerUnknown wants to create in Project Artemis. Prologue uses machine learning to generate a fresh, 8×8 kilometer map every single time you load up the game. Different terrains, unique mountain formations, random cabin placements – every time you fail to reach that weather station, the route you just carved for yourself becomes irrelevant, and you’ve got another world to explore.
These maps are vast and punishing, with aforementioned dynamic weather events rolling in at unpredictable moments, often huge expanses of wilderness in between cabins, and some brutal terrain that makes it difficult to travel as the crow flies. It’s a terrain that can change with the weather too – rainfall will make rocks slippery and create swampy mud patches that slow your movement. Prologue’s machine learning system also creates everything from beautiful, believable vistas to obscure phenomena that’ll have you questioning the laws of nature.
“I love the way that our worlds are generated, because there’s so much possibility, and there are these chances for slightly weird shit to appear,” Greene tells me. “But even the real world is full of slightly weird shit… Prologue is meant to be undiscovered, it’s meant to be unique [every time], so I’m excited to see what’s discovered eventually.”
PlayerUnknown Productions says that in Prologue, which confines itself to just one specific biome that resembles the forests of the German-Czech border, there are still millions of possible maps. The unbelievably long seed numbers in the corner of my screen each time I booted up a new map were a testament to that.
And that, at the end of the day, is the entire point of Prologue. It’s the first of three games PlayerUnknown Productions will release in the build-up to Artemis, with each one testing a core pillar. For Prologue, the pillar is how well its machine-learning brain can create new environments. By adding a gamified layer on top of the terrains it builds, it allows PlayerUnknown Productions to better understand its strengths, weaknesses, and quirks.
“Because we’re making a survival game where you have to constantly be on the lookout, we’re putting the environment under a lot of scrutiny, because all you’re doing is looking at the world around you,” senior character artist Hakan Kamar succinctly summarizes to me.
Despite that overarching purpose on the path toward Artemis, the developers still want this to be a standalone, enjoyable survival experience that they’ll support and expand over time. It’s dropping in early access first with a price point around the $20 mark, Greene tells me, and the studio is keen to add and improve features as time goes on.
Due to its unforgiving nature, how difficult it is to reach the weather station, and a constantly changing map, there’s a lot of potential for replayability here. While its visuals and apparent simplicity may put some people off, its dynamic, ever-changing, and punishing world offers an alluring, irresistible gauntlet.
