In 2017, Brendan Greene (aka “PlayerUnknown”) pioneered the Battle Royale genre of games with the early access release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The game has since gone on to become a massive hit, spawning countless more games like it, including some of the most successful games of all time.
Next year, 2025, Greene wants to pioneer something new. He wants to make a metaverse. No, not the one you’re thinking of. Greene doesn’t think those count as actual metaverses.
“I hesitate to talk about this, because it’s just such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don’t think anyone else is,” he tells IGN. “I think everyone’s building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some stage in the future, maybe if we’re lucky, but it’s not the metaverse. See, the Metaverse is a 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all operating on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that’s what I’m trying to do with Artemis.”
Artemis, aka Greene’s metaverse, is actually the third of three games he’s currently cooking up at his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. The first two are testing grounds for the technology Greene eventually wants to use to build his metaverse. They’ll each be games in their own right, but their real purpose is to work out the kinks in Greene’s most ambitious ideas before they hit primetime in Artemis.
Final Chapter Prologue
The first game, Prologue, is already being tested by players in Greene’s Discord (in an early format Greene refers to as “Preface”) and is planned for a wider release in 2025. It’s a fairly basic survival game, Greene says, with a simple loop of trying to reach an objective while dealing with typical survival mechanics. There’s weather, hunger, crafting, discoverable loot, and other such elements to deal with, but the real meat of Prologue is its terrain generation tech. That’s what Prologue is really about: testing high-tech terrain generation at a small scale, before implementing it more broadly in Artemis.
Greene calls the terrain generation tech used by his studio “Melba,” and it’s basically a world generation machine. Melba uses machine learning, and is trained on NASA data of real-world Earth terrain. With that information, Melba is able to spit out entire maps, or even worlds, that have realistic geological features, and is able to do so either randomly or based on instructions, such as a request for a world with tons of mountains. These worlds are then filled with textures, assets, and other elements designed by actual artists, and are able to be customized in a similar fashion to have more forests, rivers, or whatever other elements are desired.
“There’s a new terrain every time you press play,” Greene explains. “The seed system gives us, I think 4.2 billion possible maps, but maybe millions of those would be interesting, I’m not sure yet…But this kind of tech is really cool because we’re seeing it shaped day to day with the artists. They’re going, ‘Let’s try this, let’s update the masks we use for the river to this so we generate that slightly differently.’ And they’re learning how to use this tech along with us, which is just great to see.
“It’s more an emergent space to test our terrain tech, and we’re going to work with the community to try to figure out: how can we make this test interesting? How can we make this game mode fun? What can we add to it that’s systemic, and then will help us moving forward going into game two, and three, and building these bigger systems using the foundations we built in Prologue?”
Building the World Machine
Prologue is just game one. Game two, which is currently unnamed, will come once the terrain tech is solidified. For Game Two, Greene wants a world that’s “500 million square kilometers, earth scale” to test a different sort of tech ahead of the release of Artemis: gameplay with a whole awful lot of characters all in one space together.
Greene won’t say much about this one. He tells me about his end goal for Artemis, which is to fit not thousands, but millions of players in a space together and have everything still work. In Game Two, Greene will test that via both multiplayer gameplay as well as AI character interaction. “You’ll be controlling an army, basically,” is all I can really get out of him. Game Two will focus on multiplayer while “controlling lots of assets”…which, when combined with Melba, will lead to the massive, multiplayer metaverse that Greene is dreaming up for Artemis.
“The metaverse has to have millions of people, and server client-side, you’ll never get that. You’ll maybe get a few thousand, maybe 10,000 if you’re lucky, but it’s attacking the problem at the wrong end, which is to solve the simulation locally, which we’ve done with Preface and then you can scale to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, hopefully.”
As for what all those millions of people will be doing in Greene’s metaverse…that’s largely up to them, he says. He compares it at one point to a Star Trek Holodeck, and then later to Minecraft Survival. In the tradition of the latter, Artemis will have a sort of basic game experience everyone can play, but then those users will be able to go off and make their own worlds, freely mod them, share them with others, and essentially treat them like “3D webpages” and experiment, build, and create totally new things within these spaces. He says he’s already seeing some of the beginnings of that within his Discord community as they tool around with and mod the early release of Prologue.
“The internet was empty when it first started, and it was just the way of sharing data, and I look at this the same,” he says. “This is probably going to be empty for the first few years, but then eventually you’ll start to see the possibility of what you can do with this kind of world generator that it’s like a multiverse of worlds.”
Critically, Greene wants Artemis to eventually be like the open internet in the sense that no one can really control what’s on it, not even him. I ask him how content moderation will work in that case, and while Greene believes Artemis will need moderation, he wants that power to stay in the hands of the users.