PUBG creator Brendan Greene swears his infinite, mega-ambitious digital universe isn't like all the others: 'I want to build a metaverse because I don't think anyone else is'
PUBG's creator, Brendan Greene, has been tinkering away at his next next project for a while now with his homegrown studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. Called Project Artemis for the time being, it's a procedurally generated Earth-sized world simulation… thingy.
If it sounds like I'm being vague, it's because Greene's not keen on putting it into defined boxes, either, as he told our own Christopher Livingston in March last year: «I don't want to classify it as a game … I'm sure there will be gameplay elements. And we do have plans for a light survival exploration-type, life civilization game mode type thing—what else would you do with a massive world?»
A recent interview with IGN doesn't bring things into any kind of sharper focus, though the word «metaverse» has entered the arena: «I hesitate to talk about this, because it's just such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don't think anyone else is. I think everyone's building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some stage in the future, maybe if we're lucky, but it's not the metaverse.»
I mean, hey, I actually don't disagree with him there—the concept of a metaverse has always seemed like a pie-in-the-sky bottle of snake oil to sell you NFTs or 'digital real estate'—but he's invoking the accursed tongue, so he needs to explain what it means to him. And to his credit, he does try:
«See, the Metaverse is a 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all operating on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that's what I'm trying to do with Artemis.»
Still, Greene & Co. aren't just jumping in with two legs—Artemis is the third in a trio of projects, the first of which, dubbed Prologue, is testing the AI-assisted tech in a more controlled fashion. Greene describes it as a survival game with «a new terrain every time you press play».
«The seed system gives us, I think 4.2 billion possible maps, but maybe millions of those would be interesting, I'm
Read more on pcgamer.com
