Last December, PUBG Battlegrounds creator Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene announced the debut title of his new indie studio, Prologue: Go Wayback. Billed as an open-world survival game boasting dynamic environments and emergent gameplay, the game is set to debut in PC Early Access, but players can dive in now with the release of its first open beta.
Greene’s studio, Playerunknown Productions, says Prologue: Go Wayback is a survival game “where every journey is unique.” Players explore a procedurally generated wilderness modeled after the Czech Bohemia region to reach a weather tower. Accomplishing this involves using a small suite of tools, such as a map and compass, while learning how to navigate the terrain by utilizing natural landmarks and minimal direct guidance.
The game has no scripted path, quest markers, or instructions, giving players the freedom to explore as they see fit. Players are also challenged to manage fluctuating statuses such as body temperature, hunger, and thirst as they travel from shelter to shelter to reach the tower.
Prologue: Go Wayback leverages machine learning (ML) technology to generate realistically rendered terrain maps in Unreal Engine 5. To avoid pulling from copyrighted materials, Playerunknown Productions states it has trained its ML model to use publicly available open-source data that the studio then vets.
Check out the game’s new screenshots in the gallery below.
Prologue is also the first of a three-game plan to build Project Artemis, a larger project designed to “create and deliver a technology and platform that enables massive-scale creation and emergent play.” These three games, two of which are unannounced, will represent a solution to what the studio refers to as the “three problems of scale: realistic terrain generation, player and NPC interactions, and millions of players sharing the same online space.” Prologue is designed to tackle the terrain generation aspect of this initiative.
The open beta comes after six months of playtests by the game’s Discord community. It will remain available and regularly updated with new features until the game’s Early Access launch on Steam and Epic in the coming months. Green posted a video message stating that planned updates include community-requested features such as a map editor, a world settings menu letting players set the world as they choose, and a save game function.
