Prologue is the start of something. When you understand what Brendan Greene and the team at PlayerUnknown Productions are attempting to create – its ambition, its scope, its real-world applications – then you can understand both the blazing focus of Greene’s vision, and why Prologue: Go Wayback! is a compartmentalised start within a new digital world.
Brendan Greene is a modern day video game rock star. There’s little other way to describe a man who redefined the online shooter, first via the modding scene for Arma and DayZ, and then by building PUBG Battlegrounds. It’s afforded him a unique position, creating PlayerUnknown Productions, and letting him head off to experiment and explore what is possible, not just within video games, but in the way we communicate and interact with each other digitally. It’s wildly ambitious, and almost too big for even his own team to fully grasp. But first, there’s Prologue.
Prologue is a survival game, set within a map that changes every single time you play. That, in and of itself, isn’t particularly groundbreaking. We’ve seen No Man Sky, Valheim and others match survival crafting to a procedurally generated world, but Prologue is taking a different approach to it because this is, the team hope, a new beginning for the creation of worlds.
Prologue marries machine learning with procedural generation, systems that are interlocked and intertwined in such a way that they can create surprising, meaningful landscapes. The difference here is scale. While Prologue’s map is an ‘achievable’ 8km x 8km (for context, that’s the size of Skyrim’s map), it’s also a proof of concept that sits alongside the Preface: Undiscovered World tech demo, with the end goal of creating a system that can form and create whole planets, whole ecosystems – sitting down to talk, Greene utters the word ‘Metaverse’, but is obviously conflicted about doing so.
He leans in, broadening the scope of what they’re working on, saying, “I hate using the word Metaverse. I really do, because it’s got such a dirty stink to it now, right? Because no one’s building it. The metaverse is the internet, but in 3D essentially, that’s what we’re trying to do here. I’m trying to provide an open-source world creation engine, like the [Star Trek] Holodeck, where it’s quite easy for you to create your own world, your own experience, your own part of the world.”
Prologues come first, though, and our early look gives us a clear picture of the first game in this project. We’re met with the immediate instruction that Prologue is a hard game, with Creative Director Scott Davidson telling us, “If you find that it’s easy, it’s probably a bug”. We’ve been given a window into an early, though perfectly functional build, but there’s a sense of fact-finding, testing the water to see how our small group of press get through this initial demonstration.
Prologue has a simple and straightforward goal: make it to the weather station. That simple task is warped, moulded and wrangled by the resources you have access to, your ability to read a map and visual topography, and the weather. Here, the greatest enemies to your survival are a lack of food, water or setting out into the bitter, deadly cold of a snowstorm.
You’re dropped into a cabin. It contains a selection of necessary tools, like a map and compass, as well as a hammer for making repairs and a pair of binoculars for looking out across the world. Hopefully, there’s also some food lurking in the drawers or in the fruit bowl on the counter, and you can fill up your inventory with as much as your small backpack is capable of carrying. Besides that, you’ve got four fast-access equipment slots, and then you can’t carry any more.
You can feel the legacy, and the cadence of Greene’s PUBG. Battle Royale fans will recognise the drive to collect better equipment, to make the most of their starting loadout, and the need to set out across the map in search of the end game. That’s the Weather Station, and while it’s reductive to say that it feels as though success is hard won, this is a game that seems to delight in killing you. Death by exposure, starvation or dehydration come quickly and repeatedly, and though its painful, a streak of realism is at the heart of the team’s drive.
Your immediate decision is whether to run out the door, or to stay in the relative safety of your cabin, exploring, gathering and preparing for the long journey to the weather station. Depending on where you drop, the station will be between 3 and 6 kilometres away, introducing the element of chance and variety that it feels as though will be a hallmark of both Prologue, and its ambitious technology.
I play PUBG like a game of hide and seek, with an unwelcome surprise for you or the seeker at the end of the game. It’s little surprise that I gravitated to shoring up my cabin, staying warm by keeping a fire going, and repairing broken windows to keep the heat in. You can stay here for hours if you want, but aside from your essential food supplies, there is a finite supply of diesel for your generator. It gives some urgency to your foraging, assuming you want to keep the lights on. Heading out, collecting more and better equipment, each of these tiny successes micro doses of dopamine have the effect you’d expect. You want to play more, and you want to get to the weather station.
From the creaking of the trees in the wind to the constant crunch of your footsteps through the world, there’s a bleakness and loneliness of spirit to the game’s central loop that some might find unsettling. Brendan hopes that people will take time to appreciate that time alone though, saying, “Prologue is a lonely space, but you can just wander in the forest, set up your cabin, make it nice and cozy, sit there by the fire, right, and just have it on the background while you read a book. Then you can just read a book in front of your computer – you don’t actually have to play the game.”
Once again, that speaks to a game and an experience that hopes to be more than its base parts. Early Access is the perfect way to introduce the world to Prologue. This is a game that’s mid-development, and which, the team say, needs the community to help direct it moving forward. Scott tells us, “We’re making the type of game that would be very hard to make without player feedback. You can’t focus group your way to success.” He continued, “It needs that back and forth from the community, it needs for them to be engaged in the process, and to want to build something.”
Prologue is undoubtedly part of an exploration. One part technological and another fundamental to the human experience. Striving to survive in an ever-changing world, learning to appreciate the sounds and the solitude of that journey. It’s an ongoing process, one that has potential and pitfalls, but it feels as though this could be the start of something. A prologue to our digital future that rests on the most fundamental human need – it’s a glorious and tantalising juxtaposition.
