PUBG's very own Brenden Green - better known as PlayerUnknown - wants his new simulation game, made at his new studio, to essentially be a "realistic Minecraft" with geology that echoes the real world.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about his Earth-scale simulation game Project Artemis and his upcoming survival game Project: Go Wayback - which is built on the same, impressive procgen tech - Greene laid out his vision of a world that's true to our Earth.
"I want to do geology," he says. "I want you to be able to see an area and go 'there should be iron here' or 'there should be this resource' and maybe set up a mine and do this kind of Civilization, Age of Empires [thing] in 3D, but as a layer. If you choose to interact with that layer, you can."
Project Artemis might still be a decade away, but the team's goal is to be able to "generate a world terrain" where everything is stitched together in a way that makes real, ecological sense, and you can "then figure out by the satellite map what's underneath it." That last part is particularly important since Greene and Co. are also building caves as part of their goal to make "a realistic Minecraft."
"But again, this is why we have a ten year [plan], because doing this all in real time? We've been asked many times 'why are you doing this in real time?', but as you can see, it gives us some interesting abilities to generate worlds," he says.
That focus on realism is also being extend to Project: Go Wayback, a brutally realistic survival sim that strips the genre of any gamified hand-holding. You need to protect yourself from the cold, but you can't build a campfire from a menu. You need to make your way to a faraway weather tower, but your map won't have a handy icon letting you know your position in the landscape.
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