Battle royale is in the rearview mirror for PlayerUnknown CEO Brendan Greene. The father of battle royale has moved on from PUBG and the genre he popularized, and formed PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions. The first major project it’s working on is Prologue: Go Wayback!, and Brendan walked me through the game’s map potential, what to expect from Prologue, and what the end goal is.
Prologue: Go Wayback! is single-player and carries an open-world-survival vibe. It features randomly generated maps on every visit. In case you haven’t realized, this is wildly different from PUBG. Brendan has already explained to Insider Gaming how humbled he is by battle royale’s success.
But his new company has a new game, and it’s called Prologue: Go Wayback!
“It Takes About Two Hours to Get Across The Map” in Prologue: Go Wayback!
Prologue encourages you to explore a vast expanse. Each map is new, but the goal is the same: To survive and reach the Weather Tower. Brendan makes it clear from the outset: Prologue: Go Wayback! is about size, scale, and serendipitous exploration in the game’s unique procedurally generated 64km2 maps.
“It generally takes about two hours to get across the map. We have this interesting machine learning type that creates a new base map every time you play. So you’ve got essentially infinite worlds you can explore, and all 8×8 and looking quite nice.”
There are no vehicles, and all exploration is purely on foot. Prologue will remain a single-player game for now, as the newfound company “Doesn’t have the resources for now” to add a fully integrated multiplayer component. However, Brendan explained to me how there is still room for multiplayer functionality even now.
“Like with the map editor, you can just create and share maps with friends and race across maps, because if you pass a seed to someone with the schematic, they get the same map as you. We’re thinking maybe, like, I want to look into maybe doing some kind of asynchronous, or no, like a multiplayer where you’re maybe playing with the ghost of your friend. So like it’s not a real multiplayer, but at least you can play together.”
I was interested to learn that reaching the Weather Tower doesn’t necessarily define the gameplay experience. Brendan is happy for people to explore their bespoke biomes.
“We have one guy who survived 17 hours in a Discord because there’s no end limit. Like, you have to get to the weather tower, but I don’t care if you do or not. We had one guy who posted a picture of this cabin on the edge of a cliff and he was like, ‘I found my home.’ He just wanted to stay there. Which I love because I’m just creating an emergence space. I fell back in love in gaming through Day Z, which is just emergence. It’s like tell your own story, do your own thing, and that’s the kind of spaces I want to create.”
Prologue: Go Wayback! is part of the studio’s Project Artemis vision—which is likely to be Brendan’s final game overall.
We have more IG exclusives, such as Randy Pitchford admitting he’s ‘A little nervous’ about the more challenging parts of Borderlands 4 and Techland saying Dying Light: The Beast has ‘The most diverse world’.
Have you played Prologue yet? Are you excited for the game’s ambitious plans? Let us know through the Insider Gaming forum.
