By design, prologue It is a stripping, punishing, and isolating experience. Its simplicity, dropping a lone player into a vast, randomly generated wasteland and tasking them with surviving and exploring, has sparked some negative reactions since it launched in early access last month. This is what PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio founded by PUBG creator Brendan Greene, has in store, but they have plenty of plans to expand Survival Sandbox and offer new experiences to prove the critics wrong. In my interview with Greene, I asked him about some of the features teased in the Early Access roadmap, what additions he’d like to see in the game, and how long it will take to get to the final version of Prologue.
There are currently three official ways to play Prologue. Go Wayback is its core mode and requires players to navigate the weather from the departure hut to the weather tower. Objective: Survival becomes more intense. It’s a never-ending gauntlet that pushes avid fans of the best survival games to their limits as they try to survive as long as possible. Finally, Free Roam lets you load new maps and explore without needing food, water, or shelter from the elements. A new settings menu also allows you to play with the parameters of these modes.
However, there are even grander plans on Prologue’s roadmap, and the ones I’m most intrigued by revolve around “Construction Expansion.” I asked Greene if this would allow players to build their own shelters on the fly, or construct elaborate bases like many survival game competitors.
“I’d love to be able to build a treehouse and ride out storms in it,” he fantasizes. “Trees are just effects at the moment, so I don’t know if they have the right geometry, so it might be difficult… but the[overall]goal is to have a building system that feels freeform enough that you can really build whatever you want. At first, you might be able to scrape together a cabin or scavenge a structure in the forest in the middle of a storm to protect yourself. But I really want to give people freedom, so it’s more like (a) creative mode.” We need to test how many planks (of wood) we can produce before it breaks. But what we’re really focused on is making it as free-form as possible, so we’re more about being creative than being realistic.”
“I mentioned Valheim as (a game with) very interesting building mechanics that are freeform enough to create the Millennium Falcon,” Greene added. “So this kind of freedom is what I want in a game.”
New modes are also coming, and Green is really looking forward to playing them, but if he reveals any details at this stage, he’ll be “killed” by the team. But he let me talk about an idea that he hopes to implement at some point in the future.
“My big hope is to have something like Dark Souls where you play with the ghosts of your friends, but not full multiplayer. So we already have deterministic (elements), so if you spin up the same seed as your friends, you should get the same weather, you should get the same loot, you should get the same huts. (…) I don’t know about the loot yet. I don’t think the loot will be exactly the same. But the objective is: You and your friends can play the game together and have the same experience, even if you’re not playing full multiplayer, but you might see ghosts of your friends that you can race around the map.
We asked if that meant PlayerUnknown Productions decided not to do proper online multiplayer in Prologue, even though co-op play is very appealing to some survival rivals.
“It’s not that[multiplayer]is off the table. The way we generate the world requires the world to be 100% definitive for all players, so all players get the same world. We’re almost there.” He added that this would “require a lot of rewrites” and would take time, but that Prologue is certainly a possibility in the future. Greene says he’s aiming for three DLC expansions for the game once it leaves early access, and that multiplayer is in the final stages of development for Prologue, as it will likely be a DLC 3 feature.
As for how long Early Access will last, Green said it will be “about a year.” Subsequent DLC will not only add new features and systems, but will also “tell a little more of the story” behind the prologue. He says that as the story and survival sandbox expands, the possibility of suitable missions and quests may emerge, but that will depend on PlayerUnknown Productions making its world generation more believable and compelling.
“The world is beautiful, but (right now) there are just a lot of huts falling down. I want to see the roads. I want to see the infrastructure. I want to see (evidence of) human life that is connected to the world.”
