Of the many reveals that took place at The Game Awards, one of the most mysterious was for a new game from developer Brendan Greene, creator of popular battle royale shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. This game, titled Prologue, was revealed with a short and cryptic trailer that consisted of nothing but a first-person shot of a forest as a storm breaks out, leaving fans with a moody yet vague clue of what PlayerUnknown himself is working on next.
While we can only guess what Prologue is going to be, we can at least say what it won’t be. During a post-Game Awards interview with Forbes, Greene reiterated his previous statements about distancing himself from battle royale with his next game. In short, fans shouldn’t be expecting PUBG 2 (or even a shooter in general) from him and his studio PlayerUnknown Productions, which he formed earlier this year. What they should expect instead is the first piece of something much bigger.
Although he refrained from offering details about Prologue itself, Greene was more open about his ambitions for the scope of the project. As PUBG proves with its varied shootouts across large maps, he’s fascinated with scale in game design, and that fascination is carrying over into Prologue, which he hyped as the setup for “something new on a global scale.”
“One of my dreams is to create worlds at scale,” he said. “Hundreds of kilometers by hundreds kilometers, with thousands of people, and these are hugely difficult problems to solve.” To that end, he and the 25 other developers at PlayerUnknown Productions are hard at work testing and building towards new technologies capable of realizing Greene’s vision. They still have a ways to go, though, so it’ll likely be a few years at least before the tech is there to realize their full vision for this mystery project.
Besides the technical demands of such ambition, the sheer pressure of being able to try for something so ambitious, thanks to the success of PUBG, is weighing on Greene as well. “With a lot of other creators, they’ve been put in a box. I’ve been told go and create, and we’ll support you,” he explained. “It's so much responsibility, I really don't want to mess this up. But these opportunities don't come along very often, you don't get a chance to launch a global IP every day.”
Having spearheaded the creation of one of the most influential games of the last few years, Greene closed things off by saying that he hopes Prologue and all that follows will enable him to share his experiences with others while giving them something cool to experience in return. “With PUBG I have all these people coming up to me and telling me their stories, and it inspires me to affect people in that way. It's humbling that I can do that, and given the chance to do that again.”
Prologue is in development.
Source: Forbes