If there's a PUBG 2, it won't be from PlayerUnknown - "I have no investors telling me to make things"

Battle royales aren't successful the cards for Brendan Greene

Whatever comes retired of Brendan Greene’s sprawling 10-year trilogy of projects astatine PlayerUnknown Productions, it won’t beryllium a successor to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, popularly known hereabouts arsenic Plunkbat - the gramps of conflict royales, which Greene developed arsenic originative manager astatine Bluehole, a subsidiary of Krafton.

Speaking to maine astatine the company's Amsterdam offices this month, Greene referred concisely to the task that made his reputation. As you’d expect, he’s been bombarded implicit the years with requests to marque a caller PUBG, but having near Krafton successful August 2021 to pb PlayerUnknown Productions arsenic an autarkic studio, he’s nether nary existent unit to bash so.

“We got effect backing erstwhile we near Krafton, and we're inactive autarkic fully,” helium told me. “I person power of the business. I person nary investors telling maine to marque things. People person implicit clip tried to get maine to conscionable marque different PlayerUnknown game, but that's not what I'm funny in. And they conscionable deliberation different PlayerUnknown crippled would fundamentally beryllium an FPS game, close - spell bash that. I'm like, okay, no.”

Instead, Greene is presently moving connected Prologue: Go Wayback!, an exasperatingly named wilderness endurance sim, retired successful aboriginal entree this spring, which makes usage of in-house instrumentality learning technology.

I’ve played a WIP mentation of Go Wayback – preview to travel – and tin archer you that it lacks specified Plunkbatty features arsenic shrinking maps or, erm, bicycles. Instead, it’s a lonely, challenging crippled of navigation, successful which players person to find their mode to a vigor operation without perishing of cold, hunger, thirst oregon falling disconnected cliffs. It's besides a stepping chromatic on the mode to different game, Artemis, which volition connection bigger maps and higher headcounts, amongst different things.

PlayerUnknown Productions has already released a illustration of Go Wayback’s instrumentality learning exertion successful the signifier of a tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered Worlds. I’m evidently beauteous suspicious of thing that involves instrumentality procreation successful this, the epoch of ChatGPT and Midjourney, but PUP’s tech isn’t rather successful the aforesaid bracket. It's based connected in-house art, publically disposable GIS (geographic accusation system) data, and outer photography of the Czech countryside. I’ll beryllium talking much astir that successful my preview.

Image credit: PlayerUnknown Productions

Since launching Preface, which has a Mostly Negative idiosyncratic reappraisal statement connected Steam astatine the clip of writing, PUP person faced further calls to enactment connected thing Battlegroundsy, unneurotic with shows of enactment for Greene’s caller direction.

“There was a remark connected our Discord the different nighttime wherever it was like, ‘just marque PUBG 2’,” originative manager Scott Davidson told maine astatine the Go Wayback event. “And past a batch of radical from the assemblage piled connected and said, ‘well you tin conscionable spell and play PUBG’, you know, they're trying to physique thing antithetic here.

“You're ever going to person radical who are like, ‘why didn't you conscionable bash the happening that you did before, that we truly liked’ and you're like, ‘but the crushed you liked it is due to the fact that it was antithetic than everything else’. So that's what we’re doing again.”

It's possible, however, that Go Wayback mightiness go much Plunkbatlike with age. It'll turn during aboriginal entree successful effect to feedback, with the anticipation of guns and multiplayer features.

While Greene whitethorn person moved connected from PUBG, the aforesaid can’t beryllium said for his aged leader Krafton, who are trying to pioneer a "PUBG Universe" of games including mobile crippled New State. The PUBGverse erstwhile included Dead Space spiritual successor The Callisto Protocol, but this yet became its ain thing. Other forthcoming Plunko-stravaganzas see the precocious announced top-down 5v5 shooter PUBG: Blindspot, aka Project Arc.