Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene details epic scope of his next title: Project Artemis

Brendan Greene, creator of PUBG, has set out the stall for his next game and the ambition is literally global. Project Artemis is devised to create a planet-sized world for players to explore and survive within, using machine learning to generate an experience of unseen size and depth. 

Greene talked publicly about the huge scale of his next title, in a wide-ranging interview with GamesBeat over the weekend. The aim is for a persistent and emergent world, where players can make their home. 

“This kind of desire to have a digital life is strong in a lot of gamers. Providing this space where it’s a big enough world–I love Rust, but if you play on a busy server there are bases every few meters. I want a space where you don’t discover a player’s base for miles.”

Greene’s new Amsterdam-based studio has now separated from PUBG publisher Krafton, although it still has a significant investment in the company. Currently it numbers around 25 staff, who are working on Prologue, a technical demo of the open world that will come before Artemis as a testbed. 

Prologue will be a single-player experience to test teh terrain generation technology that Greene and his team are developing, with Artemis set to be a planet-sized follow-up that will utitlise that to create a massively multiplayer world, something similar in scope to the kinds of experiences that Improbable’s SpatialOS is looking to support. 

Although it’s very possible that Greene will be taking such technology from a partner he says: 

“We’re going to be leaving multiplayer until the end, because multiplayer tech is coming out every year,” he said. “The further we push that out, the more chance there will be to leverage some exciting new tech. Already there’s stuff out there being developed for high player counts, to get across that thousandth player. If we’re doing the worlds we’re doing, the size we’re doing, we have to have massive numbers of players.”

And of course the Metaverse came up in such a discussion, but Greene isn’t yet certain that Artemis will be a part of a universe of universes quite yet. 

“It won’t be Tim Sweeney’s metaverse or Unity’s metaverse or PUBG’s metaverse. They’re all separate universes. Even the blockchain stuff going on right now, I’m not sure it’s the metaverse,” Greene said. “Maybe it’s a part. They made a good talk in that talk about how the metaverse has to be open. It has to be a protocol. Ultimately, with my world, I want you to be able to access it from a browser.”

For the full interview head over to Gamesbeat.