Elvis Presley once said, “Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.” Brendan Greene, the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), has loads of ambition. His battle royale game, inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), has sold greater than 80 million copies.
And one in all Greene’s ambitions is doing something necessary like that again in video games. And so he just announced that his PlayerUnknown Productions is resurfacing after years of development with a three-game plan to bring on the subsequent generation of survival games. And it’s ambitious.
I talked to Greene, who’s referred to as PlayerUnknown, about it in an exclusive interview. It’s down at the underside of this introduction and I hope you prefer it. At the tip, I asked him about ambition.
Greene got the concept from the movie that he could stage a battle where 100 people would compete with one another. With each player eliminated, the battle space would get smaller until the last two were battling it out in a really small circle. The last one standing was the winner.
Greene first created a “mod” called DayZ within the Arma universe. Then he teamed up with South Korea’s Krafton to make PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, disrupted shooter games like Call of Duty. On the strength of PUBG’s 80 million in sales, Krafton went public and Greene became wealthy from that. That gave him the cash to work on something much more ambitious.
I had a front row seat to this plan. Greene went off on his own to create a brand new startup, PlayerUnknown Productions, in 2021 to make a gaming survival world that was rather a lot like a metaverse. Then he gave me a scoop on his ambitions.
Without anything to indicate me except a screenshot on the time, Greene said was making a world called Prologue that had an enormous amount of terrain — about 100 square kilometers. That world, greater than simply about any existing game world, could be a test where players would drop into the world and take a look at to survive until they exited the world in a given spot. It could be different each time they dropped into it.
Now Greene has released a video that describes his intentions more concretely. Prologue now has an actual preview within the video and the world looks very realistic, with trees and grasses swaying within the wind. And it’s still an enormous world, fashioned with machine learning and AI tools. The aim is to release it sometime in the midst of next 12 months as a single-player game for people to attempt to survive.
The challenge is that the open-world of Prologue can be an emergent place, where anything can occur and the weather will get progressively worse. It could seem easy to get to the exit point on the map, however it’s likely going to be hell getting there.
Then there can be something else. The company will do a shadow drop of the corporate’s free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World, showcasing its in-house game engine called Melba. Preface will find a way to generate terrain for an Earth-size virtual world, using little or no in the way in which of computing resources.
This demo goals to offer users with an early have a look at the modern technology that can power the next titles within the series, and eventually a 3rd game called Project Artemis.
Project Artemis is the large-scale end goal project of the series. As described prior to now, Greene sees this as an Earth-size world where players can drop in and create their very own gaming experiences in several sections of the world. We don’t use the word metaverse a lot anymore, but that’s what it looks like to me. The journey to get there could take one other five or ten years.
In the video, Greene said he launched into Prologue three years ago and “then life happened” and it has taken three years to get it right into a solid and breakthrough shape. Now the corporate can start sharing it and getting feedback “to make it into really something different.”
In our interview, Greene said that the team began pulling together when Laurent Gorga joined as CTO. About a 12 months ago, Gorga began putting in motion a process that enabled the team to make rather a lot more process. While they were making the tech, the team would now create frequent builds to check the tech on a granular level. They began making enough progress in order that they began scheduling the timelines for Prologue and Preface. And they talked about it in a video stream on December 6, throughout the PC Gaming Show. It made loads of jaws drop. Prologue is anticipated to drop into early access on the second quarter of 2025.
“When I began this I used to be attempting to make a bigger open world experience than most individuals made, and we tried to offer a few years and we found a technique to try this,” Greene said. “We essentially reinvented the way you create these worlds using machine learning technology, using natural earth data to generate” the terrain.
Now the corporate is able to test this terrain, which can form the idea for the larger worlds. He said the team broke the journey into three stages. The first job was to fill out the terrain of the world. The second was to fill that terrain with a lot of interaction when scaling up. And then third, the goal was to tug a bunch of those players onto the world, Greene said.
The company will keep enhancing Prologue with its current game engine after which it should move it over to the subsequent version of its game engine.
Prologue began off as an experiment in Unity after which it moved to Unreal a few years ago and the tools have proven to be a solid foundation. The proprietary tech will eventually find a way to generate a world with thousands and thousands if not billions of objects in it, with the assistance of machine learning.
“It’s more in regards to the large scale and again machine learning is superb at it because it should capture the patterns that we teach it,” Greene said.
The physics can be realistic. If the bottom gets wet, the terrain becomes a slippery mud and rivers can form, and these may have repercussions for players as they fight to survive in a wilderness. This will make the sport difficult, but it will probably’t be unbeatable, Greene said.
“We’re discovering what’s fun, what is just not fun but at its core it’s about survival. I feel the more we are able to test, the more we are able to get the feedback from the users or the players, and that’s one in all the explanation why we’re going to early access,” Greene said. “The more we are able to actually engage with the community and get their feedback” the more it will probably reshape the models in the proper way.
Meanwhile, the corporate is working on Melba, the in-house game engine. Using machine learning, it should find a way to generate worlds after which regenerate them for the subsequent game.
“The way that we construct the engine is allowing us to scale as much as large agent interaction,” Greene said. “We have an Earth-scale planner with some various biomes and a few easy systems to will let you explore it.”
The company is working on two projects directly — one with Unreal and one other with Melba — in order that it doesn’t develop tech in a vacuum, said CTO Laurent Gorga, within the video. Unreal and Prologue will generate a bit of the world. Preface will help achieve the dimensions, after which Artemis can be the complete expression.
“I need to get our tech into the hands of the people on the market to assist us perform what this tech will turn into,” Greene said. “Like this terrain tech is interesting, but I actually need, I need to go away it open. I need to go away it moddable.”
Greene said this may occasionally be a five or 10-year journey, but Prologue might be available on Steam within the second quarter of next 12 months. There were loads of details about what he’s doing that we talked about. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: I used to be very impressed by your demo. I saw the Discord event, in addition to the announcement.
Brendan Greene: It’s been a busy six months. We finally got it out the door.
GamesBeat: I remember the unique vision and the way you went about doing it. It appeared like there was an enormous technology pivot or approach pivot you made. What did that involve, from the time you were first talking about it? How has it turned out?
Greene: We found Laurent Gorga, who we appointed as our CTO. He’s within the video we released. He desired to make more of a product, reasonably than a research experiment. Try to focus our efforts on releasing something. He said he doesn’t imagine in developing tech in a vacuum. Laurent, Kim, Scott, Petter, they sat down and discovered how we could leverage the good team and tech we had, and the ideas we had, and make it into something we could release.
He posted only last week on our Slack. He said, “A 12 months ago I joined the corporate, and said that in a 12 months’s time we might release something.” Not to the day, but in a 12 months’s time we released something. It’s a credit to him and the team for making it work.
GamesBeat: Is there a straightforward technique to explain what the approach is, and the way it differs from what you had tried before?
Greene: It was the approach that Petter dropped at the production of Prologue, but in addition that Laurent brought–we brought each projects into production reasonably than keeping them as research experiments. That was the previous tech lead’s view, that we should always prove all of it out before we move right into a more production stage. Laurent really believed–I remember Petter joining and asking the sport team, “Let’s play the construct.” They said, “Play what then?” And inside per week we had a playable construct together.
Since then we’ve shifted mentality, from experimenting and fidgeting with ideas to–now that we’ve got really strong leadership in tech and production. That’s put us on the proper path. It brought in additional traditional techniques. We have a seven-week sprint. We work fully distant, roughly. We’re experimenting with find out how to make the teams work together well. We have a superb synergy between all the various departments now. We have a core engine team. We have our art team. They all work together in conjunction on all of the projects.
It’s a credit to Kim, Laurent, Scott, and Petter. I even have the vision. I even have the dreams. But they’re the fellows that basically make it work.
GamesBeat: How many individuals did the team grow to now?
Greene: We’re 60 people now. That’s fully staffed for Prologue.
GamesBeat: That’s higher than the unique plan called for.
Greene: Yes, I feel we were around 50 or so. But now we’ve got publishing. We have finance. We have a game team of about 30 people. The core engine team is about 10 or 15 people in the mean time. It’s a extremely tight team now. The team itself–we’ve got a presentation and Christmas party in a couple of days. We’re doing five-year anniversary presentations. That’s quite something. Lots of the team have been with us for years. I’m very glad now that we’ve got leadership in place that may do what I need to do, reasonably than telling me we are able to do what I need to do after which not likely having a plan.
GamesBeat: The vision sounded the identical. You’re going to construct this world, after which the players will work out what the sport is.
Greene: The vision really hasn’t modified. Even after I checked out some old pitches I did from 4 years ago, after I was first pitching it internally to Krafton–again, it was a three-game plan. They got here back with barely longer time frames and barely more realistic goals, however it was still this concept that we’d prove each stage of the tech with each game we’re constructing. The vision continues to be the identical.
I don’t think anyone is serious about constructing a metaverse. I feel everyone’s constructing IP bubbles that can sometimes need to talk over with one another, I assume. I don’t really see the metaverse as described by the people constructing it. What we’re doing, it’s open. We have it in Discord. People are already modding and hacking it. I see Artemis or Melba, that engine being hopefully an open-source world creation engine that can power some type of 3D web. It’s not only one world. It’s a whole bunch of worlds, 1000’s of worlds. I see every world as like an internet page.
Since we did the discharge–they’ve those things, deep links. You probably saw them in Discord, where you’ll be able to hop across the planet. I had this flash in my mind. Maybe that’s what a hyperlink can be. There’s this concept that you just don’t need to travel there on the planet. Someone will just send you a link to something cool on their planet or your planet or Tom’s planet. Then you’ll be able to click and it should open up the app and convey you there, very like a browser will in today’s web. It’s only a 3D location that has something interesting, or not. It might just be beautiful. The vision continues to be going for that.
It’s not meant to be like a game world. It’s a world with game-like experiences, I’m sure, but ultimately it’s just an enormous world for players to return and construct or view or share. I’m not likely sure what they’ll do yet. I do know I’ll give them a lot of tools to do stuff. I all the time thought that the world we’ll provide, or the instance we’ll provide, can be like Minecraft survival. That can be our slice in all of the worlds. That’s more just an enormous Earth-shaped thing that appears like Earth and has basic survival mechanics. Let’s say civilization mechanics. You can do a lot of stuff to eventually construct communities. But again, that’s 10 years away, I feel.
GamesBeat: I didn’t quite grasp what the three games meant. Prologue is a geographically limited game. Preface is more like a demo. But I didn’t know whether you counted that as one in all the games. And then you might have Artemis.
Greene: Preface can be the ultimate game, probably. Prologue was just us testing the small-scale systems, player interaction, and the terrain tech. The reason we’ve got three games is that every is solving one step in the method, or one problem. The first is terrain. Prologue, we’ve got our ML tech that powers the terrain, generates the terrain. We can leverage Unreal to check that on this box called Prologue. We can test out a lot of player interaction systems. How will we store that? How do we’ve got persistence? All this using this ML agent.
Game two can be testing the ML agent on an even bigger scale, making greater terrain. Hopefully the terrain tech can be relatively mature at that stage. And then excited about multiplayer. Not on a crazy scale. Just what’s usual on the time. But then a lot of agent interaction. It’s going greater and testing the terrain, the systems, stuff like marketplaces on a rather greater world, before we finally go to massive multiplayer, where I hope a whole bunch of 1000’s if not thousands and thousands of individuals, in 10 years, on this massive terrain, which ought to be generated locally–that ought to be well mature with all these other systems that we’ve tested through Prologue and game two. It’s all just iterating on the vision.
GamesBeat: Will each game then be a separate product that gets to market? Or do you see them more as demos?
Greene: Prologue can be a product, of course. There’s a story that we’ve got, that I would really like to leverage during early access, or after we launch right into a full product. But it serves a purpose. I don’t need to put every bell and whistle on it, but it should still be a product. Then, once its life cycle is over, we’ll evolve it into the subsequent stage. Prologue will move into the subsequent game. Maybe you’ll be able to play Prologue in the subsequent game. I don’t know. But it’s type of like Rust. As we go greater, the products can be separate products, but they’ll bleed into one another and iterate on top of one another. They’ll stand on one another’s shoulders, so to talk.
GamesBeat: If you might have a story, it feels like you’re going to make your game inside that game world. But you’ll also make it moddable in order that other people can play with it and work out what type of game they need to make. Prologue may be that directed game where–it looks like it’s necessary so that you can design a game, versus leaving all of it as much as consumers.
Greene: When I thought of this a few years ago, once we were excited about whether we could generate a terrain each time you press play–that’s an interesting idea. What’s the best thing to do here? I thought of an easy survival game where you get from A to B across a map. It’s you each time. The weather gets worse, wave-based weather. It just keeps hitting you. Prologue is actually that. It’s not that I’m making a game. I said within the Discord chat that I need to construct games with the community, not for the community.
This is an interesting way of generating game worlds. We have some easy systems in it, but already, throughout the playtest, persons are suggesting, “How about this? How about that? I need to remain in a cabin for 4 hours and play guitar and watch the weather outside and never do anything.” I’m not attempting to make people play a game. There are things you’ll be able to do inside Prologue to get to the opposite side of the map, get to the finish, and learn a little bit of what the sport could also be about. But otherwise you’ll be able to just sit within the cabin for 5 – 6 hours for those who want.
I’m not attempting to force people down a specific path. That’s why I need to get the community involved early. This way of making game worlds is interesting and exciting to me. People who love survival games greater than me will give some really good ideas once they get a likelihood to play it. That’s why we’ve got playtests already. People are already finding strange things in regards to the game. That excites me. Sharing this tech early with the community and getting their input now’s how we make this an incredible game. It’s not only me directing every thing. It’s pulling feedback from individuals who really care about these games in ways in which I haven’t thought of.
GamesBeat: One thing that I ponder is what type of variations you’ll be able to have if the sport is–I don’t know for those who call it procedural. You regenerate the world each time you log in, is that what you’re actually doing?
Greene: It’s machine learning procedural, however it’s machine learning. The ML agent generates a low-res map in the beginning of the sport. Technically, mathematically, we are able to do 4.2 billion-odd maps, or generations. If one million of those are interesting, I’ll be glad. But you’ll be able to see within the background, that is the ML map, but with us generating mountains. These are going to be unattainable to create. You won’t find a way to traverse them. But the concept was, we would like to get the weather station up here. How can we make it more interesting and get it up within the clouds? They got very excited once we generated this, but no, it’s not going to be traversable.
The concept that it gives us a base to work on in Unreal–the maps we’ve got, I’ve seen a superb deal of variation. Even now, it’s very early days with this tech. The guys are discovering recent ways to control the PGC system, the procedural generation system in Unreal, to create more interesting biomes, to leverage our tech to create different rivers, masks for rivers and mountains. It gives a fairly good variation of worlds. We’ve seen some interesting worlds from the generations already, and that may only improve over the subsequent six months.
Before we did our very first playtest with the Dutch Game Association, we had gotten cabins spawning within the week previous. This is all very recent for us. But it’s still exciting. This looks cool. It’s not going to make it into the sport since it’s far too high, but still, this type of landscape, to me–yes, I need to go explore that. I need to stand up to the highest of that. That’s why we’re doing it.
GamesBeat: There’s the joys of exploration you could have in a world that generates again and again. What in regards to the feeling of familiarity that some people might want? I can see myself considering that I just want Earth, so I do know where every thing is. Or something that continues to be persistent that I can return to and explore different parts of it. Is that going to be possible? Or will or not it’s different each time you log in?
Greene: Melba and Preface is supposed to be persistent and deterministic. If you return to the identical place, you’ll see the identical things, all the time. That’s the aim. With Prologue, it’s seed-generated. We can hopefully eventually share the seed of the map you simply played with friends, and you’ll be able to play that very same map. There will hopefully be a meta-game. Maybe you’ll be able to even race people. But that’s probably DLC content down the road, because for the primary launch it’s an excessive amount of to expect from the dev team. This is just not a fully-featured product. I don’t need to split dev resources. I need to focus Prologue on what it’s there to do, which is test the terrain tech and make an interesting systemic survival mechanic or game loop that we are able to carry over.
It’ll never duplicate the Earth. Nvidia’s Earth 2, that type of thing, our terrain tech isn’t designed like that. It’s not designed for replication. It’s designed for Earth 5, Earth 10. It looks just like the Earth. It may need the identical feeling, the identical biomes. But for those who go to Barcelona it’ll look rather a lot different. It’s not Barcelona. It’s just that a part of the world generated in a brand new way. Also, I just think Earth’s been done. So many other persons are generating duplications of these items. Go on Google Maps and you’ll be able to see the world. I need to create unique spaces. This goes to be Earth-like, in fact, however it’ll be not-Earth-like as well, depending on who’s putting within the design input. This will all be open.
GamesBeat: Some of the variability goes to return from what number of biomes you’ll be able to create, then? If you give you 1,000 biomes, you’ll be able to have wide variation within the terrain.
Greene: Exactly. But again, you have a look at NASA data, and there are 20 defined biomes on the Earth. That fills the entire Earth. They’re very high-level definitions of what a biome is, though. Tundra, this type of stuff. Within these you’ll have sub-biomes and so forth. Earth data already provides us with an enormous amount of knowledge to attempt to train these agents to present us the proper combination and depth. We still style and theme the worlds. We choose what number of biomes, how ceaselessly they need to mix. That type of thing continues to be decided by us reasonably than agents. We’re still guiding their hands, so to talk.
GamesBeat: If any individual desired to re-create your battle royale inside Prologue, do you think that that may work?
Greene: Prologue, you won’t find a way to try this. It’s Unreal. It’s a single-player game. This is a survival game. We’d wish to open it up for modding, but I don’t know if that’s on the table at once. Whereas Preface, the tech demo we released, that’s being released with an open mind. We’re leaving the files unencrypted. The models are there so that you can play with for those who can. We’re not attempting to hide that. I wish to say it’s HTTP version 0.01.
It’s funny. If you concentrate on biomes, there are already people in our Discord who say, “I’ve been going for hours and it’s still just the identical rocky desert.” Yes, since the Earth is big. The true scale of the Earth is very large. It’s going to take time. The web was pretty empty on the very start. I see the identical thing with Preface. Right now it’s empty. There’s not much happening. But people within the Discord really see the likelihood. You can see them getting what it’s, or what it might be.
GamesBeat: By Artemis, then, you might have that world where anybody could create anything. You could do your battle royale there. But perhaps you would like to rope off territory and say, “You can only play on this area.”
Greene: No, not necessarily. One of my earlier ideas–say I discover this forested area here, and I need to do a motocross race. I should find a way to simply pull up something on my wrist, paint where I need the track, and the sport provides the remainder. The game enacts a motocross race for me, adds every thing there. That’s what I would really like. We’re probably 10 years away from getting there, if not longer. But ultimately I would really like that ease of creation. You can just wander around this big planet, fly around doing whatever, see something cool, and say, “Yes, I need a battle royale there.” Or a motocross race or whatever. The game should make that easy for you.
That requires whole layers of considering, different networking layers specific for those forms of game modes. They’ll probably lift and shard off that a part of the world from the major world. As I said, five or 10 years. Probably longer.
GamesBeat: If you have a look at what everyone else is trying in these other ways, there’s the Nvidia Earth 2. There’s Hello Games trying something with a planet-sized world. There’s Flight Simulator doing it by adapting photos of the Earth that planes or satellites can take, getting their hands on all that available data to generate an Earth. Are there any approaches you’ve seen that you just’ve thought of or found interesting? It looks like everyone seems to be doing something different.
Greene: As I said, I like our approach. I feel we’ve got a fairly good one. We use three agents to generate the world locally. Most of the stuff I’ve seen from even Epic’s big world stuff is server-client. I don’t think that’s the way you create massive worlds. You’re all the time depending on a performant web connection and all types of things that a child in Africa doesn’t have. How do you generate a world for everybody that half the world can’t access?
Our view on it, which is, you do the simulation as much as possible locally on the device, reasonably than worrying about server farms handling that for you–I just think the longer term is local anyway. Ultimately I would really like to have all my data stored locally and provides it out to the network when I want to. Otherwise it’s here, reasonably than worrying about what server it’s on. Again, five or 10 years–for what we’re attempting to create with Melba and the platform, these sorts of things are necessary to take into consideration. They will come into play in a really big way. Trying to resolve them with Band-Aids is just not the technique to do that.
GamesBeat: The good thing is we’ll have way more storage by the point this is prepared. The interesting thing I talked to the Flight Simulator people about, for those who added up every thing they created for Flight Simulator 2020, it was about 500 gigabytes. Then they decided to shift almost completely to the Azure cloud. Now they’ve just 50 gigs on the local machine, and every thing else streams in. That led to some hiccups initially, attempting to take care of so many players coming in, but that appears to be under control. But I ponder, why would that way of constructing a world be harder to do than the approach you’re taking, where it feels like most of it should be on the local machine?
Greene: I’m not accustomed to how they do things. I assume the core difference between their tech and our tech is that it’s still generating game worlds in an old way, where you should understand what they appear like. Our tech understands that inherently. It understands what terrain is, what mountainous regions are, what biome placement is, what trees to put in various areas. That’s all done generatively and in real time across the player, reasonably than having every thing baked. That’s why you might have a lot data, whether 50 gigabytes or 500. Our world, which is 500 million square kilometers, is 3.6 gigs. That’s all generated locally on the player’s side. It’s just the way in which they’re excited about doing it.
We have three patents on what we’re doing because we’re making these breakthroughs. How we’re doing it is a recent way. We’ve seen other attempts at using inpainting and all types of stuff, using ML in other ways to create these worlds. But I’ve been glad with what we’ve been capable of do. We’re generating thousands and thousands of worlds in Unreal now, eight by eight, and they appear pretty good, pretty high detail, not super fake. They look natural. It really excites me. I feel this will open up games to rather a lot more varied experiences, reasonably than replaying the identical map another time.
I saw that The Long Dark is coming out. But also Don’t Starve. That was an incredible game, super procedural, a distinct map each time. It was exciting to play. But we’ve never really had that in a single-player game. Maybe we’ve got and the web will shoot me down. But I really need to create this type of replayable single-player game that focuses on exploration. We were even putting perhaps a tent into the sport, because people had said, “Maybe I need to sit down on a hill until the weather changes and see the vista.” So let’s put a tent in so people can survive there as an alternative of being cold. There’s this type of lovely back-and-forth with the community already.
The dev team is happy. The community Discord is happy. I can’t wait to see what we are able to do in the subsequent six months as we ramp as much as Q2.
GamesBeat: I remember once we were talking in regards to the metaverse before and what happens if you attempt to go between worlds, different worlds. There’s one query there. Did you concentrate on breaking up something like Artemis right into a bunch of worlds? You have a lot territory here, something planet-sized–
Greene: But I feel it should be eventually. It can be thousands and thousands of worlds. It’s just like the web. It won’t be one single page.
GamesBeat: You mentioned that if you cross a border, AI goes to translate your stuff from one world into the subsequent world.
Greene: I might hope so.
GamesBeat: I assumed that was crazy on the time. But the last 12 months or two years of generative AI–it looks like it’s made that possible. Has that turn into necessary on your plans?
Greene: I wouldn’t say very necessary, but there’s definitely been some advances that we are able to leverage. For example, texture generation. For a complete planet, to make sure we’ve got a wide range of textures, ML generation is great. It gives you infinite variety, mainly. It also speeds it up and lowers the associated fee. You don’t have to store a whole bunch of texture files. It’s all generated on the fly as you undergo the world. Stuff like this, we are able to find specific ways for it to make the world run higher, with a smaller footprint.
Doing the photo to a 3D object, that type of stuff is exciting to observe, but I’m not all in on AI yet. Even though I’m working on it quite a bit. There are some great possibilities. It’s an exciting future. But we would like to watch out about committing too hard in a method or one other. We’re pretty glad with what we’ve got at once. But some advances in the previous couple of years have filled me with a bit of pleasure as well.
GamesBeat: I used to be trying to consider game spaces inside these different projects you might have. With Artemis, it looks like you’d have those thousands and thousands of various sorts of spaces. People can decide to have very small game spaces, like a town where you would have a gunfight, or very large ones too. How many individuals do you envision in a single game space? Is there a maximum you’re excited about?
Greene: I don’t know. In the shared experience I need thousands and thousands of individuals. Having an enormous Earth-scale world, you wish thousands and thousands if not billions of individuals. But I don’t think that’s–again, solving the network problem. We’ve solved the terrain issue, generating massive planets. That’s not that arduous. It’s not that costly anymore. We can do it locally. It doesn’t ask for loads of disc space. It generates pretty nicely. It’s the identical for multiplayer. We need to be certain that the protocol, the layer we’ve got works well allowing multiple people to get on the identical space together.
I might like to see a 1,000-player team deathmatch, with teams of fifty or 100 players going against one another. Why not? As long because the play space is large enough. With game two it’s something we’ll attempt to explore, upping the player count to something that’s still reasonably possible after which seeing how that large-scale interaction works. Again, if it’s a systemic world, if it’s emergent, like loads of the spaces I like creating, it’s easier to construct. But these sorts of large-scale interactions excite me because nobody’s really pursuing them. Everyone’s still glad with 20 or 30 or 100 players. Come on! It’s been 20 years already. Give me thousands and thousands of players, please.
GamesBeat: Lots of game designers have said that that’s all they’ll see as being fun. Would that many players in a game be fun for the person? The Call of Duty designers are perfectly glad with six-on-six.
Greene: Again, 100-player battle royale probably wasn’t seen as fun before it happened, and it turned out to be loads of fun. I don’t think we are able to say something isn’t fun if we’ve never experienced it. I struggle with that type of–it will probably never be fun if it’s over whatever number? Let’s try it. Maybe it’s fun and perhaps it’s not.
I’m not attempting to make games with thousands and thousands of players. I’m just attempting to create these shared social spaces for thousands and thousands of players to have experiences together. Maybe they’re games. Maybe they’re concert events. Maybe they’re all types of things. But it’s more that you might have large-scale interaction. But hell, bring on 1,000-player battle royale and see what happens. Bring on 1,000-player search and destroy. Look at the true world. You see now–paintball games was six-on-six, but now you might have whole teams of a whole bunch of players going at one another in a few of these massive paintball tournaments.
I don’t know. Any recent technology scares the stalwarts, right? You saw it with that lovely ILM documentary, “Light and Dark,” about moving from puppetry to computer graphics. We can’t do it? Oh, shit, we are able to do it. Of course puppetry has now evolved into something much more special. It’s been forced to evolve due to other tech taking away the low-hanging fruit. It’s all the time an evolution. You should need to see it move forward, reasonably than simply attempting to trap it in a box.
GamesBeat: I remember games like World War II Online. They were attempting to get 100,000 people or more into an MMO, in order that they might replay historical battles. Would something like that be doable inside this type of world?
Greene: Wouldn’t or not it’s great? We could get 100,000 people all playing together. That could be great. The tech should delay. But again, that is what game two and game three are intended to check and prove, to be certain that that we’ve got multiplayer, that we’ve got interaction systems, that we’ve got all these AI systems that work well together. By AI I mean bots in games, so you’ll be able to control stuff. Having all this level of interaction and scale all working. As I said, Melba, Preface, it’s all open. Not open source technically at once, because that comes with certain responsibilities we’re not able to commit to yet. We need time to work. But we’re still doing it with this open mentality, where nothing’s encrypted. It needs to be built with the community. The web was, and I feel the metaverse needs to be the identical.
GamesBeat: In this type of game world, does the concept of shards still exist?
Greene: No, because I don’t see servers. That’s the thing. I feel it should be peer to see. We’ll have a hybrid peer system, where you’ll have peers that handle–you would be one in all these peers if you might have an honest enough system, handling the high-level simulation for physics, weather, ballistics, these other heavy needed simulations. That sends data to lower-end devices. That’s how I see this working. We’ll have some type of peer to see system that can self-validate or self-auth reasonably than being reliant on servers.
I still think we’ll have a hybrid peer-server form of model that can hopefully find a way to distribute across each users and a more industrial grade. But again, I don’t think–it will probably’t be based on servers, or else we’ll never get to a whole bunch of 1000’s of players. It just doesn’t work like that.
GamesBeat: Is it beginning to look more like a decentralized blockchain infrastructure?
Greene: No. It’s decentralized within the sense of that word. I still think “federated” is healthier than “decentralized.” It achieves the identical general goals. There was that interview I did a 12 months ago with Nathan where he asked me about blockchain, after which the subsequent day it was “PUBG guy making blockchain game!” That filled me with joy.
Blockchain or hashgraph or whatever, decentralized ledgers are useful in certain regards, especially if you’re attempting to construct a decentralized network. Whether we’ll use them, we don’t know. We’re years away from actively investigating that. It’s an interesting space, but I don’t see us using it in the same technique to the way it’s been used to date. As a tech stack or a tech layer it’s interesting, however it’s not something I’m going to construct games on. I don’t get that part. I’m constructing our own engine. It may incorporate some level of the tech as a layer to facilitate digital bookkeeping, but for me, that’s in regards to the usefulness of it.
GamesBeat: Are you confident in the power of a peer to see system to handle something so large?
Greene: Just brash confidence, right? With reckless abandon I say yes. I feel we’ve seen, with Bittorrent and blockchain, that decentralized peer to see may be secure. There are some recent blockchains that do this type of self-auth stuff quite well. I’m relatively confident, as confident as I may be with the knowledge I even have, that something can be there that may work.
Because we’re not constructing a game, so to talk – we’re constructing a world – then there’s certain–we don’t need to make it as performant, for instance, as an FPS game. There are certain things we don’t need to make sure at that level. But then if you would like to have an FPS game inside our world, we’ll probably need to use a more known network protocol to enable a superb experience there.
GamesBeat: What if the player is requesting a certain world? “You have an incredible wilderness world, but I need a city. Can you generate that for me?” Instead of getting a random world, can they need for a certain type of world?
Greene: With Preface, everyone gets the identical world. With Artemis, everyone will get the identical world. If you would like to create your personal world, the tech stack can be there for you to try this. Maybe we’ll provide a way where you’ll be able to give us some money and we are able to create a world for you. I don’t know. This is 10 years away. But for me it’s all the time been like Minecraft. We’ll offer you Minecraft survival. You can go there, explore, create, do things on the earth using the tools we offer, but when you would like to create your personal world, you might have to place it together yourself, host it from your personal machine, reasonably than counting on us.
We’ll provide one layer, and experiences for a lot of parts of the world, but you won’t be making a recent world if you press play locally. You’ll just be entering our world. Also, it will not be just our browser that you just use to enter this world. Maybe someone has already created a brand new browser, higher than the one we’ve got, that means that you can do more on the earth.
GamesBeat: Do you think that that your world goes to be a contiguous world, an actual 3D planet, versus something like–Second Life is that this collection of places you’ll be able to go, however it’s not the map of a world.
Greene: I would really like our world to be contiguous. I would really like that it appears to be the one world. But again, I don’t know. Ultimately I need to create a contiguous world. That’s what I would really like to do. I would really like something like this you see within the background, an enormous world that’s there to explore. There’s a lot of stuff to do. People can do whatever they need with it. Great. That’s the aim. Let’s talk again in a couple of years and see where it’s going. But that’s the aim, to offer a contiguous, unique 3D planet that means that you can spawn at various locations and create some stuff. It may need some urbanization. Early on it’ll probably have little or no. But as we add more systems it should get more interesting.
GamesBeat: Would you get something just like the actual physics of the Earth?
Greene: Why not? Exactly. Then perhaps we’ve got a more extreme world, or a more playful world. It ought to be easy sliders for me. That’s ultimately what we would like to create with Melba. It ought to be that easy. We can just change a slider and the gravity changes. The world is created in real time, so if the info barely changes, we should always find a way to try this.
GamesBeat: I feel I do know the reply to this, but others is perhaps wondering. How do you construct something this big without 10,000 game developers?
Greene: That was all the time the aim. When we sat all the way down to do a 100 kilometer by 100 kilometer map initially, after I was still at Krafton, we discovered–okay, you wish that many game devs to construct that world, since it takes a lot time. That’s why we tried to resolve–how do you create a world in real time and generate it? That’s how we’re doing it. We have already got the terrain a part of that solved. We still need to work out the way you store persistent data in an efficient way, but no less than we’ve solved the terrain generation part.
Now comes the gameplay and other systems. But since they’re all the time systemic, they’re pretty easy, especially in the true world. I hesitate to say I don’t see this as much of an issue, but I feel we’re solving the larger problems. The terrain was an enormous challenge. We’ve solved it in a fairly unique way, in a breakthrough way. There’s still rather a lot to do, rather a lot I don’t know, but I feel the vision is evident. I’m confident about getting there.
GamesBeat: Financially, is your situation still pretty just like what it was a 12 months ago? You had your personal money. You had money from a few firms.
Greene: We have funding to get us through launch and after. Of course we would really like extra money, but we prefer to make that from selling the sport and using that to reinvest within the studio, reasonably than searching for one other round. My aim with all of this, all the time, is to be certain that the team can pursue the vision without having to fret about just pumping out products on the market. Whatever we decide to do moving forward, it’s all the time with that priority in mind. I even have to present the team that protected space to dream, to find a way to be psychologically protected. “This is a superb place to work. We’re performing some good things.” We’ve achieved that pretty much over the past 12 months. People feel good coming to work and excited in regards to the project. I need to proceed that. We have to sell games, but we’re pretty good at once.
GamesBeat: When you look down on the micro level of things just like the cabin you had, it was pretty detailed in there. On that side, do you envision–do you might have to have a military of creators making these small things that might be useful for players in this type of world? How much work is that?
Greene: I’d love for our art director to present you a correct answer on this, however it’s more that the tools lately, for instance Houdini, are allowing us to do rather a lot more variation on stuff like cabinets. Ultimately there can be some type of blueprint that may generate multiple different variations. We have something like 300 variations of the cabin spawned the world over, since it’s relatively easy to do. It doesn’t take loads of dev time. The cabins still look pretty good. With the variation they’re relatively believable.
It does take time. I’m not going to say it doesn’t take time. But I’m impressed by how far they’ve are available in the last six months. When Petter, our producer, joined about nine months ago, he asked, “Where’s the construct? Where can I play the sport?” There weren’t many responses. Within per week he got a playable construct up and running. Since then, the progress has been remarkable. We have a game that I get excited to begin up, excited to run and take a look at to seek out my way through it. I can’t wait to get it within the hands of more people.
GamesBeat: It appeared like one thing you were asking players to present feedback on was the extent of detail on the earth, if it was enough. Do you think that you’ll have a difference in the standard of what you’ll be able to generate in comparison with the standard they’d expect in single-player Unreal Engine 5 games?
Greene: I feel it looks pretty good already. The forest landscapes–we still need some more detail, of course. Especially the terrain level, to make it a bit smoother. But it’s keeping me glad. I’m pretty pleased with the way it looks. The forests look natural enough. It’s still early days. We still have six months of labor to focus down on the feel and look. But I’m pretty glad with what we’ve got already. I feel players ought to be excited to explore the world. There’s enough detail already that it doesn’t look bad. Let’s put it that way.
GamesBeat: The Flight Simulator people said that in comparison with 2020, the 2024 game has 4,000 times more detail within the landscape. That suggests a rate of progress they’ll proceed to ride on. Is that something you’ll be able to do? If players do demand it, is that a curve you’ll be able to ride in a roundabout way?
Greene: We’re attempting to construct the engine in a really generic way, in order that as recent tech comes on stream, we should always find a way to update that part or add it in. It shouldn’t be much of an issue. The world we’re constructing in Prologue behind me, we’ve already undergone various iterations on the terrain uprezzing tech. We’ve already gotten it all the way down to finer detail. As our agents improve, because the training improves, it should improve and higher. As you’ve seen with loads of AI – image generation, video generation – it should all the time improve. We’re constructing the engine with that in mind, that it should continually be iterated. If a brand new thing comes online, we should always find a way to adopt it as quickly as possible.
If people want more detail, sure. I don’t know for those who’ve played the playtest yet, the construct, I’m pretty glad with how the world looks. It’s a bit rough still, however the forests look pretty good. I’m excited.
GamesBeat: Well, I’m still very impressed with the scope of the ambition here.
Greene: I attempt to be consistent with my madness, right?
GamesBeat: Would you might have advice for people around sticking with their ambitions?
Greene: Just be stubborn. Or, well, no. Someone told me I’m not stubborn. I’m single-minded. I’m in a privileged position to find a way to do that. I do know the games space at once is just not essentially the most wonderful place to work. There’s been a shit-ton of layoffs. There’s this conglomeration of IP where studios are only being thrown out the door. We’re in a privileged place at once, that we are able to pursue this and have me able where I don’t need to worry about anything apart from pursuing it. But being single-minded about what you do–if someone tells me no, I search for a way around it. If you actually imagine and think it’s reasonable and possible, then it’s best to pursue it.
There are all the time going to be folks that inform you no. Like you said about game designers who’ve decided that games of 1,000 persons are probably not going to be interesting. They said that about games of 100 people, and now those are a few of the hottest games on the market. If you’re sure about something, for those who’re confident and optimistic, just pursue it. Be single-minded about it.
That’s not very clever stuff. That’s what everyone says. It’s hard, though. You’re going to get knocked down rather a lot. But it’s having that anger inside you, the spite inside you, to say, “I’m going to prove you mistaken.” Just going and doing it. It takes loads of work. We were lucky with battle royale. It took about three years to form a genre. Counter-Strike took rather a lot longer. DOTA took a while as well. Things take years to cement and turn into something. That’s the opposite thing to recollect. It doesn’t occur overnight. It might look like it does, however it took me a 12 months and a half or two years to be certain that battle royale was in a spot where it was picked up by someone greater and went somewhere crazy. It does take time. Don’t quit. Keep going.
GamesBeat: The metaverse appeared to encourage loads of people, including you, some years ago. It’s gone out of fashion now. Do you continue to imagine within the metaverse, or has your view of that modified?
Greene: I just don’t see the metaverse that everybody else is constructing. This concept that it’s an IP bubble–even within the interviews which were going around, that the most important challenge is the business to business. The metaverse isn’t controlled by firms. It’s not my metaverse and your metaverse and this metaverse and that metaverse. It’s the metaverse, I imagine. That’s only achievable if someone builds an open-source platform or protocol that everybody can use. There’s no partnerships needed. It’s just there, like HTTP. We tried to monetize that with AOL and other things, but really the metaverse just needs to be an open-source platform.
That’s what I’m trying to offer with Melba, which is just this open-source tool that creates digital places, very like HTTP generates web pages. That’s where I feel the metaverse is. I haven’t gone off it. I’m still plugging forward toward it. I feel that’s what it ought to be, reasonably than what everyone else is attempting to construct, which appears to be only a funnel to sell you skins.
I don’t think we ought to be excited about what matches on the earth. There’s all the time going to be a joker in a crazy costume running the ultramarathon. This world may need billboards put up because someone can afford to do it. This is a gorgeous world. What people make of it? Well, we don’t know. But let’s see.
