Prologue: Go Wayback! the new survival game from PUBG creator Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene, will launch into early access this summer, at a $20 price tag.
In a new trailer, which you can see below, developer PlayerUnknown Productions introduces you to the huge open world that Prologue will set you down in. From your starting point, you'll have to navigate (the old-fashioned way, using a real compass and map) to a weather station somewhere in the surrounding area. But as you do so, you'll have to contend with driving snow, pouring rain, and howling gales. and that's before you have to struggle to navigate in the dark, or deal with the hunger pangs that are sure to accompany multiple days tramping around in the wilderness.
That vast array of different locations and weather conditions exists because Prologue is not just a normal (if difficult) survival game. For one thing, it wants to be "as hard a survival game as you can make, but it's also the first step towards a much bigger goal. Greene wants to make sprawling maps thousands of kilometres in size, and Prologue is the first viable test of the tech used to make it. When I played the game in the team's Amsterdam studio earlier this month, the devs reckoned there were anything up to 4.2 billion different worlds seeds, meaning win or lose, you'll never see the same map twice.
The new release window means that a three-year journey for Greene and his team is drawing to a close, but Prologue will be launching into early access on Steam, which means that it'll continue to develop in future.
"If we can do it… This will be something groundbreaking": PUBG creator Brendan Greene is five years into making a 10,000km "realistic Minecraft" – but there's still a decade to go.
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