If there's a PUBG 2, it won't be from PlayerUnknown - "I have no investors telling me to make things"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Whatever comes out of Brendan Greene’s sprawling 10-year trilogy of projects at PlayerUnknown Productions, it won’t be a successor to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, popularly known hereabouts as Plunkbat - the grandfather of battle royales, which Greene developed as creative director at Bluehole, a subsidiary of Krafton.

Speaking to me at the company's Amsterdam offices this month, Greene referred briefly to the project that made his reputation. As you’d expect, he’s been bombarded over the years with requests to make a new PUBG, but having left Krafton in August 2021 to lead PlayerUnknown Productions as an independent studio, he’s under no real pressure to do so.

“We got seed funding when we left Krafton, and we're still independent fully,” he told me. “I have control of the business. I have no investors telling me to make things. People have over time tried to get me to just make another PlayerUnknown game, but that's not what I'm interested in. And they just think another PlayerUnknown game would essentially be an FPS game, right - go do that. I'm like, okay, no.”

Instead, Greene is currently working on Prologue: Go Wayback!, an exasperatingly named wilderness survival sim, out this spring, which makes use of in-house machine learning technology.

I’ve played a WIP version of Go Wayback – preview to follow – and can tell you that it lacks such Plunkbatty features as shrinking maps or, erm, bicycles. Instead, it’s a lonely, challenging game of navigation, in which players have to find their way to a radio tower without perishing of cold, hunger, thirst or falling off cliffs. It's also a stepping stone along the way to another game, Artemis, which will offer bigger maps and higher headcounts, amongst other things.

PlayerUnknown Productions has already released a sample of Go Wayback’s machine learning technology in the form of a tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered Worlds. I’m obviously pretty suspicious of anything that involves machine generation in this,