Brandan Greene, AKA PlayerUnknown himself, has just revealed his new studio's next project: an ultra-realistic survival game that's aiming to be the toughest in the genre.
Prologue: Go Wayback! seems simple enough. You're plopped into a rural cabin in a valley not too dissimilar to the places you might have seen in other survival games already, with the goal of reaching a weather station on some valley above, all while fighting off hunger, thirst, and the temperature, of course. It sounds like your average survival experience - except, this time, there are no tutorials, and any gamified mechanics are entirely stripped out of the experience. To build a fire, you'll need to place the logs manually. To find the path forward, you must orient yourself on a map devoid of markers. It's as realistic a survival experience as you could get without actually wandering off into the middle of nowhere.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, creative director Scott Davidson says it's "supposed to be as hard a survival game as you can make, and realistic in terms of the way the mechanics work." The goal isn't necessarily to make a 'fun' experience but to make one that values "engagement" above all.
"We want people to be immersed in the game and then engage with what they're doing," Davidson continues. "I always joke that if a game lets you out, and you think 'I'm gonna go do something else', then you [as a developer] kind of failed. You want to feel immersed in this, and then you have to constantly engage the player in what they're doing."
The Prologue team knows it won't be everyone's cup of tea, though. "For Prologue, we feel like the bar of entry should be somewhat difficult," senior character artist Hakan Kamar says. "It's not an easy experience. So we really play on the delayed gratification of finding your own way, finding how to achieve certain things."
Kamar even stressed that the team wants "you, outside the game" to have learned something after overcoming an obstacle, whether you've figured out how to use a compass or cook a fish you caught. The solutions you find in real life should work just as well in Prologue. "We want to have an entry level for that for somebody who plays some games."
"If we can do it… This will be something groundbreaking": PUBG creator Brendan Greene is five years into making a 10,000km "realistic Minecraft" – but there's still a decade to go
