Brendan Greene, a game designer better known as PlayerUnknown, who helped create the battle royale genre – first in the Arma mod, then in H1Z1then in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) – plans a new large-scale multiplayer shooter. The current plan is for the game to support 100 vs. 100 player battles.
The shooter will be the second game in Green's three-game master plan being developed at his new studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, he told me during a video call. The first game in his plan, Prologue: Go Wayback, is a game about wilderness survival and orienteering.is already close to release – it will go into early access later this month, on November 20th.
But to understand the concept of a shooter, you need to roughly understand the general idea of the three games Green wants to create. These are completely different experiments designed to test different parts of an ambitious and potentially revolutionary new game-making technology. I'm talking about creating a world on a planetary scale. I'm not exaggerating when I say Greene's goals are as ambitious as remaking the Internet, but more on that in a separate article.
The first game, Prologue: Go Wayback, was originally created as a way to implement and test terrain-level planet generation. Each time you play, the game creates a new 8×8 km forest game world for you to survive and explore. The second game, meanwhile, will focus on testing various systems such as shooting and multiplayer.
“The second game is aimed at testing limited multiplayer, maybe up to 100 versus 100 players,” Green told me. “It's more of a mixture of first-person shooter and real-time strategy. That's how I imagine it. And the goal is to test landscapes on a larger scale. So we can test first-person shooter mechanics, we can test interactions between NPCs, we can try to test these networking protocols at scale. So this is the second game.
“And then the third game,” he added, “is where we really move into large-scale multiplayer. And then we can use everything we've learned from the previous two games: creating the terrain, allowing players to create their own planets, and having a network that works for whatever you want to use it for, whether it's an FPS game or whatever you want to create in these worlds.”
The plans are big, and again, I will talk more about this comprehensive idea in a separate article. But how much of the second game was actually made or written down? How much of this exists outside of Brendan Greene's head? Because remember, Prologue: Go Wayback isn't even available in Early Access yet, and I'm told there's still a year of promised open development to go.
What exists in the second game? “The general plans are at a high level for now,” Green said. “I have an idea for a game in my head, and we talk about what it will require from the team – what time frame we are going to do it. Because it will use our own engine and not Unreal. [as Prologue uses]therefore Melba is required [the studio's proprietary engine] be in a state that artists and designers can work with.”
By the way, a game demo of the Melba engine, which generates worlds, is available on Steam. Search Preface: The Unknown World there.
“But because it's going to be an FPS game,” Greene continued, “that requires it to be in a completely different state than we released Go Wayback! in, for example, in the early stages. So it takes time.”
How much time? “We have a general idea of how long it will take to get to the second game,” he said, “and then for the second game we're looking at another two, three, four years, maybe longer. We have more or less a 10-year plan to get to Game 3.”
By the way, you can already play Prologue: Go Wayback ahead of its release in Early Access, as part of the open and free beta testing. This is where I wandered and found it a very powerful experience. The forest world is detailed and immersive, and the weather systems are terrifying. Rushing from cabin to cabin as a snowstorm hits and the temperature drops is a stressful and exhilarating experience. Even inside, you may not be safe as the wind rattles, breaks windows, and dislodges wood-paneled walls. You'd better make sure there's a fire in the fireplace, your belly is full, and you've packed all the warm clothes you can find.
