PUBG creator is building a planet-sized sandbox game

pcgamesn.com:

Since early this year, we’ve known that PUBG creator Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene has been working on something big – he’s shown off a tech demo that produced 64x64km squares of runtime generated terrain, and said that it’s a ‘proof of concept’ for a sandbox game on the planetary scale. In a new interview, Greene and his collaborator David Polfeldt, the former managing director of Ubisoft Massive, shed more light on the project and what Greene hopes to accomplish. It sounds a lot like a metaverse, but without the usual corporate buzzwords and brands attached.

Greene and Polfeldt are the subjects of former Edge Magazine editor Nathan Brown’s latest Hit Points newsletter on Substack, and the entire article is worth a read. Greene’s project, it seems, got off to a rocky start, and he takes the blame for that – he didn’t have experience managing large teams of developers, and this resulted in some inopportune hires of people who weren’t right for the project.

Greene’s studio is called PlayerUnknown Productions and is based in Amsterdam, where he’s brought on Polfeldt to help with the kind of day-to-day production responsibilities that make a large studio work. The end goal is something they’ve called Artemis for the time being, and it’s meant to be an “Earth-sized virtual world in which hundreds of thousands of players would be able to make and play anything they liked.”

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Greene says, was originally meant to include much more than the battle royale game mode that ultimately defined it. Having first gotten into game development in the world of DayZ and Arma modding, Greene envisioned a virtual world in which players could build whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted.

From Brown’s interview,