PUBG creator's roguelike survival game with machine learning-generated worlds hits Steam early access next month – the first step toward "realistic Minecraft" for "millions of players"

PlayerUnknown Productions, a new studio separate from modern PUBG mothership Krafton, has a new game out next month. It's a single-player survival game with roguelike elements that's somewhat confusingly called Prologue: Go WayBack, billed as the first in three games building toward the studio's, and PUBG mastermind Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's, vision for a super-game called Project Artemis, which hopes to one day bring "millions of players" into a dynamic survival ecosystem that Greene once dubbed "realistic Minecraft."

Prologue: Go Wayback will enter Steam early access on November 20 for $20, the dev announced.

We saw a slice of the game earlier this year at Steam Next Fest, with the demo showcasing a first-person survival game that finds heaps of entertainment in what most survival games might cover in a few minutes. Simply making a campfire, for example, is a big deal, and with no guides or markers to follow, you have to keep a keen eye out. Or you could load up a free roam save just to drink in the wilderness.

The headliner for Prologue: Go Wayback is its use of machine learning, a sort of artist-guided and controlled generative AI, to create its worlds. This is where the roguelike elements that PlayerUnknown Productions boasts of on Steam start to creep in.

"A brand new 64km2 world is generated on your PC every time you start the game," the store page reads. A map editor also allows players to build their own worlds or import an image to use as the foundation of a world.

"A New Map Every Time You Play," the studio likewise claims in a new press release. "Explore vast, beautiful landscapes generated through an in-house machine learning algorithm guided by artists."

This world generation is distinct from the unintelligible AI-generated games scraping whatever art they please and making the rounds online – closer spiritually, perhaps, to the likes of Minecraft's seed-based world generation, though that is actual RNG procedural generation that doesn't rely on AI – but Prologue: Go Wayback still has an "AI generated content disclosure" on Steam. It reads:

"We are developing our own in-house machine-learning model which is trained on publicly available open-source data and vetted to prevent the use of any copyrighted material. This ML model is used to generate base terrain maps in Unreal Engine 5 which are then populated procedurally with custom assets such as the trees, rivers, rocks, and hills you explore. Our artists and designers use our ML model to allow us to generate 64km2 maps that look and feel natural and realistic. The game generates a new map offline on your system every time you play."

We also spoke to Greene earlier this year, who threw out "realistic Minecraft" as one way to explain the end goal of Project Artemis, said to be many years away from even beginning to coalesce. If you thought Hello Games' simulated planet survival game Light No Fire was ambitious, have a gander at this.

Prologue Go Wayback! - Early Access Announce Trailer - YouTube

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"The Early Access release of Prologue: Go Wayback! marks a significant step forward in the development of Project Artemis, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions' long-term mission to create and deliver a technology and platform that enables creation and emergent play at a massive-scale," the studio said following the early access release date reveal.

"To produce the technology to power Project Artemis, the independent studio is developing its own in-house Melba engine, which can be explored in the continuously updated playable tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World."

Yep, that sounds like the kind of thing you'd need PUBG money to build.

PUBG creator on how his Earth-sized open world differs from Light No Fire: "I'm not making a game. I'm building a world."