Brendan Greene’s plan to build a massive digital world
This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series here: The metaverse — How close are we?
Brendan Greene invented the battle royale genre for video games. His PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) has sold more than 75 million copies since 2017. Instead of making more sequels to PUBG at Krafton, he spun out his own studio, PlayerUnknown’s Productions, and is working on the most ambitious game he could possibly make.
He calls it Project Artemis, and the plan is to make a planet-size open world where players can define the rules and contribute their own content. I talked to Greene about it at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 event.
Greene’s small team will first work on a proof of concept, dubbed Prologue. It will be a Unity-based single player game world that is quite massive itself, with a play space of 64 kilometers on a side. The object is for the player to get to an airfield and exit the map, overcoming obstacles such as freezing weather. You have to create warm spaces and move on in order to escape the increasing cold.
That map will be regenerated every time players start the game, and Greene hopes the same will be true for Artemis, which will take perhaps five years to make. So far, Greene hopes that Artemis will enable players to set up their own towns and create games within the borders of those towns. But he won’t script a narrative for Artemis. And in spite of his ambition, Greene doesn’t really like the word “metaverse.”
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“I’m not sure if that’s what I’m building,” he said. “I first set out to do a concept what I want to do next. I just knew I wanted to build a big open world. And as we developed the ideas
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