We spoke with the famous developer at San Diego Comic Con Malaga to learn a little more about Prologue: Go Wayback!
We had the luxury to speak with a multitude of interesting personalities and stars across the world of entertainment during our time at San Diego Comic Con Malaga. One of those individuals is perhaps one of the better known developers around the world today, as we caught up with Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene to talk about one of his latest projects.
We asked the creator of the massively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds about Prologue: Go Wayback and how this ambitious survival game is progressing and how fans are reacting to it following arriving in a beta form.
“I’ve been really excited, like seeing people in our Discord, stuff like ‘this game is crack’,” PlayerUnknown began. “They’ve been saying, ‘I’ve been playing an hour and come back and play three hours and then coming back the next day’. One guy survived for 17 hours in the game, I think…
“Like people sending me clips of cabins they’ve found overlooking a cliff and they want to live there. It’s why we did an open beta rather than launching straight into Early Access because from the feedback we got in the community, we thought, you know, they want more of a platform. They want more of a game that you can set it up however you want. So, that’s what we’re doing, like we just pushed it a bit.”
PlayerUnknown continues by talking about the upcoming plans for the project, explaining: “So, there is a survival game, sure, and it’ll be my experience. Open world, but you’ll have a settings menu so you can set up the world how you want. There’s going to be a map editor so you can create maps you want and share them. So, it’s more than a single-player platform than just a single game mode, right? And that’s what’s exciting to me and seeing that feedback from the community of them being excited by that. Like we already have people speed running maps or even distance running because now we don’t tell you where the weather tower is. So, like finding the right route to the weather tower from the starting cabin is a challenge and people are speed running it. So I’ve been super excited about what I’ve seen.”
As Prologue: Go Wayback is built using machine learning technology (ML), we asked PlayerUnknown about where the idea for this incorporation came from and whether machine learning was the plan from day one.
“It was because of what the end goal is. So, my end goal… we have Preface: Undiscovered World, which is our tech demo of Melba, and that’s an earth-scale world. And in order to do an earth-scale world, traditionally, you would need to ship hard drives of data to people because it’s just so much data. So, the only way to do that is generatively and ML is really good for that. You can give it low data and it can extrapolate and infer more data from that. So, that’s why we’re using ML because with a small programme on your PC, then you can generate an earth-scale world, because nothing’s stored. It’s all generated in a bubble as you move through the world.
“So, that’s why we’re doing ML, because proceduralism in its traditional form is fine, but it leads you with a certain number of outcomes and you can kind of see patterns. Machine learning gives you almost infinite variation. So, especially building natural worlds. We can do infinite worlds in Wayback already, where it’s 2.6 billion seeds on one schematic. So, it gets very big very quickly. So, that to me is why we’re doing it in ML, because it’s the most efficient way to generate these big worlds locally.”
Catch the full interview with PlayerUnknown below for more on the Melba engine and how Project Artemis is still the developer’s end goal.
