“I watched Ready Player One and thought, 'Wow, this is what I want to do.'”
PUBG creator Brendan Greene AKA PlayerUnknown has left PUBG Studios and is currently working on a crazy-sounding, ambitious game at his studio PlayerUnknown Productions. Greene shared more details about this project in an interview with GamesBeat and said the idea was to create a kind of metaverse and give people a new place to exist in an Earth-sized game world.
“We want to give people a new place to live, because that has some issues,” Greene said of the new game, which is being made under the Artemis working name. Greene didn't want to utter the word metaverse, but that seems to be what he's trying to accomplish.
“I don't want to say that word. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I watched Ready Player One and thought, 'Wow, this is what I want to do.
Players will get their first encounter with Greene's vision in Prologue, a pay-as-you-go tech demo that places players on a massive map and forces them to survive against the elements. It is a single player game and there is no war. Greene thinks it will be boring. But it's intended to serve as a first look at some of the ideas that Greene and his team hope to achieve with Artemis.
“I think it's going to be pretty boring. Make a fire, close the windows with boards, keep yourself warm against the constant storm where the cold air will knock you out.” “But still, it's more than just showing a coherent world with logical points on which you can do something, and it's a system game.”
Prologue is a "test bed" for the gameplay elements of the world he hopes to realize in Artemis. “Arma is what battle royale is to it. It was a place for me to test, iterate, get the final game mod, and then say, 'OK, it works. That's what we want to do with Prologue,” said Greene.
One of the biggest differences between Prologue and Artemis is the size and scale of the game world. While Prologue takes place on a very, very large chart measuring 64 kilometers by 64 kilometers, Artemis' world hopes to be on a planetary scale. Its radius can exceed 6.000 kilometers, which is the size of the Earth. While the true size of Artemis' gaming world has changed, Greene said he has observed a trend among players in their desire for a "digital life" where they can move to a new place. The idea for Artemis is to allow users to create cities, societies and civilizations.
“Providing this space that is a big enough world – I love Rust, but if you're playing on a busy server there are tops every few meters. I want an area where you won't explore a player's base for miles." “This is a large settlement rather than a box,” Greene said. “I've always been excited about these things ever since I came back to the game by really exploring open worlds. Red Dead Redemption is great, but it's just a series of scenarios. Go kill all the bears in an area, go, come back and they will all come back again. I want to live a meaningful life in the world. If you kill all the bears in an area, maybe the deer population will explode.”
Greene and his team are making a custom game engine to realize their vision because they couldn't find a commercially available option for what the studio had in mind. The team at PlayerUnknown Productions currently consists of about 25 people, and Greene said the studio only plans to expand to 50. They don't need a huge team because technology and machine learning will do a lot of heavy lifting to create games.
As you can imagine, Artemis isn't going to be released anytime soon - Greene said it could take five years or more.
-Editor kıps: “You finally announced a game like this. Anyone who knows, there is an anime called SAO, I've been waiting for games like this since I watched it, seriously -.- aren't you excited too??"
