We’ve known since earlier this year that PUBG creator Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Green is working on something big: He showed off a tech demo that created 64x64km squares of run-generated terrain and said it was a “proof of concept” for the game on a planetary scale -sandbox. In a new interview, Green and his collaborator David Polfeldt, former general manager of Ubisoft Massive, shed some light on the project and what Green hopes to achieve. It is very similar to the Metaverse, but without the usual buzzwords and corporate branding.
Green and Polfeldt are the subjects of former Edge magazine editor Nathan Brown’s latest Hit Points newsletter on Substack, and the full article is worth a read. Green’s project seems to have gotten off to a bad start, and that’s his fault: he had no experience managing large development teams, which led to the premature hiring of people who weren’t right for the project. .
Green’s studio is called PlayerUnknown Productions and is based in Amsterdam, where he recruited Polfeldt to help with the day-to-day production tasks that keep the large studio running. The ultimate goal is what they’re now calling Artemis, and it should be “an Earth-sized virtual world where hundreds of thousands of players can create and play whatever they want.”
According to Greene, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was originally intended to include much more than just the battle royale gameplay that ultimately defined it. The first to start game development in the modding world of DayZ and Arma, Green envisioned a virtual world where players could create whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted.
From Brown’s interview, it seems that the main challenge to solve is related to technology, but the developers believe they can overcome it. “Right now, games are locked into these 20k by 20k boxes,” says Green, “because that’s what you can reasonably make with a great team of artists in five years.”
So, as Brown points out, if you can create a system that can spawn a 40-by-40-mile square and populate it with plants, wildlife, NPCs, and artist-created structures and objects, you’ll be spared the hardest part of the journey. . – the rest just allows you to repeat it as many times as it takes to build a full planet.
This 64km x 64km system should work in a tech demo called Prologue, which will start out as a very minimalist survival game about finding shelter in a vast desert. Greene says this will increase over time, in the same way that games like Rust and DayZ have developed and added new features throughout their existence.
Ultimately, it seems Green wants to create what might be called a metaverse, with a digital goods economy at work. Brown says that it may or may not include technologies like blockchain, and that Green himself is more interested in decentralizing ownership of the platform than any specific technology to make it possible.
“It’s for everyone, right? Ultimately, we don’t have to control it,” says Green. “I am very jealous about it. It has to be done a certain way. It only exists if it is done for everyone and not for money.”
It’s unclear when we’ll know more about Artemis or Prologue, but we’ll be very happy to get our hands on it when it’s ready to debut. In the meantime, be sure to check out our list of the best survival games on PC to keep you busy.
Source : PC Gamesn
