Prologue is a survival game, but it's not just a survival game. The first title from PUBG creator Brendan Greene's new studio, it's also the first step on a years-long odyssey to make open-world games that will dwarf anything from this generation. And being part of that grand experiment means that it doesn't have to obey traditional genre laws.
"It's supposed to be as hard a survival game as you can make," creative director Scott Davidson tells me during my Prologue preview. From what I've seen of Prologue so far, he's right. Its simple objective - navigate to a weather station across a large open-world - belies a game that will kill you quickly and repeatedly. But beyond being a ruthless example of an often-unkind genre, it exists to do something else: Prologue is proof-of-concept of the terrain-generation tools that Greene and his team have been working on for three years. The survival elements, Davidson explains, go "on top" of that machine learning-driven world-generation tech. That means there are "limitations of what you can do," but it also means that the devs don't just have to stick to what's come before.
