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.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this and what I want to do within this multiverse of digital spaces, you give the power to the community, that if someone acts like an asshole then they’re locked out of spaces. And it comes down to identity. We have to solve the identity problem because anonymity online kind of breaks the social construct. But if on our network or on our system, it’s tough for you to reenter it or to create an identity twice, you could still be anonymous, but at least there will be consequence to action.”
Greene also suggests that instead of outright banning people who cause issues, one path might be to turn miscreants into “ghosts” that can’t interact with anyone. They can see everything happening and browse the world, but they are incapable of speaking or otherwise engaging with anything in it. “If you look at Covid, there were 12 people that generated something like 96% of the misinformation that was online. [Author’s note: The actual number was 65% of disinformation posts on Facebook, and 72% of all anti-vaccine content.]…If you shut out this small group of people that really actively try to upset the information space and deliver propaganda, then you’ve solved the problem kind of holistically…I think that the future will be local. Everything will be local. You will have your identity locally and you will share it as you see fit, and it won’t be stored by people across the world. At least I hope.”
I press Greene on this – what if people are doing illegal things in this metaverse? What about copyright violations, or worse, everything Roblox has been accused of? At what point does he become responsible? Greene admits he doesn’t have an answer yet.
“That’s where we’re going to have to figure it out. As I said, I want to build games with the community, rather than for them, and I think with their help and finding out what tools they need to better do this, then we can figure out how to do this in a way better way for everyone. Thankfully we have good AI regulation in the EU as well so there are checks and balances there already, at least this side of the planet to help with this, right? I mean, let’s see how long they last, but at least there are people smarter than me thinking about it already. So I’m happy to follow guidance, and work with the community to figure this out because it’s important to get right.”
Long Road Ahead
Greene’s vision is incredibly technically complex, and he mentions several times that he doesn’t expect we’ll see its final form – Artemis – for ten, maybe even 15 years. He’s already highlighted a number of the challenges ahead of the team, but I ask him about another one he hasn’t yet mentioned: is Artemis going to be PC-only? No, he says. It’ll be on everything, eventually.
“It has to. I mean, the device is just an access point to the world. It has to be. Kids in Africa on their mobile phones have to be able to access it the same as gaming PCs on the West Coast. The experience of the world might be slightly different, but because it’s not a game, that’s okay. It just has to run on every device.”
And there’s another technological issue I need to raise with Greene: NFTs. Previously, it’s been reported that Artemis will implement them, but Greene says that was a misunderstanding stemming from an interview he did with Hit Points back in 2022.
“[Nathan Brown] asked me about blockchain because it was the hype thing at the time,” Greene says. “And I explained that blockchain, I thought, was an interesting financial instrument, as a layer within a digital world. But that was it. I said maybe some future iteration of blockchain or hashgraph or that tech is interesting. Ultimately it’s a digital ledger and if we can use a digital ledger, we’ll find the best one and use it. But that’s really it. The next day after I did that interview, [headlines were] ‘PUBG Guy Making Blockchain Game’, and that’s not what I said. It’s an interesting tech and I think it can be used if it’s useful, but otherwise we’ll use what is the best at the time.”
So he’s not currently thinking about NFTs in Artemis, then?
“No, not even thinking about it. Our concern is about getting the engine to a state that we can make things in it and then as I said, Game Two, we’ll test ideas then, but really now not even thought about it. More just getting some fun games made.”
Between the length of time Greene needs to build Artemis and the sheer amount of questions still looming about its final form, Greene and his studio have a difficult road ahead. He’ll need time and personpower, which also means money, and the games industry is currently going through a funding drought amid layoffs, closures, and project cancellations. Greene says his project is fine, having gotten funding for Prologue early on and used it thoughtfully thus far. But that doesn’t mean Artemis is guaranteed. He says they’ll still need people to buy Prologue so they can sustain development long-term.
Still, Greene isn’t daunted by the fact that he’s basically claiming he wants to build an entire second internet in a time of mass game and tech instability. In the same way that PUBG started out as a fairly barebones game but became a smash hit that launched a genre, he believes his new vision can grow to something massive with the help of a creative community. And maybe, he suggests, a successful Artemis could even help prevent the current games industry situation from happening again.
“Games are driven a lot by data points on Excel spreadsheets rather than making fun games and it’s a little depressing,” he says. “So that’s why I want to stick to my vision because I think we need a platform like this. We need a platform where people can just create and not worry that you’ve got an exec team shooting it.
“I want to find the next PlayerUnknown. I was really lucky to have been given this chance and providing people with a platform that can help do that, why wouldn’t I do that? And yes, it’s a big vision, but I’ve got a good team of industry professionals and they don’t think it’s that crazy. So yeah, I’m filled with confidence.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
Add comment