PUBG creator gives update on Prologue and Artemis, launches free tech demo Preface

PUBG creator Brendan Greene has shared new information on his studio’s upcoming projects Prologue and Artemis, and has released a free tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World.

Greene, who’s best known as PlayerUnknown, announced back in 2021 that he had decided to leave Krafton, the South Korean publisher that owns PUBG Studios and published PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).

At the time, Greene revealed that he was working on a new project called Artemis, and a precursor to it called Prologue.

Now, in a new six-minute video, Greene has given more information on Prologue, as well as a new free tech demo called Preface: Undiscovered World, which is available to download now.

According to Greene, Preface is a way for players to test his studio’s new in-house engine Melba, which allows it to “scale up to large agent interaction on massive worlds”.

In the video, Greene describes Preface as “a very simple experiment where we have an Earth-scale planet with some various biomes and some simple systems, to allow you to explore it.”

“The way that our terrain tech works is that until you go there, that place isn’t discovered,” he explains. “You won’t know what the biome is, you won’t know what the ground looks like until you get there, so it truly is an Undiscovered World.”

PlayerUnknown Productions CTO Laurent Gorga also explains in the video that Preface and Prologue are two different attempts to work on the technology that will eventually power the studio’s full game, Artemis.

“Why we are working on two projects at the same time, is because I don’t believe in technology developed in a vacuum,” Gorga says.

“This is why we have Prologue, which is on Unreal Engine but we are using part of our technology to generate a world. It’s why we have Preface, which is more about attacking the scale, so we attack the problem from both ends.

“And then after we’ll have some different products – and I’m saying products because sometimes it’ll be a game, sometimes it’ll be a technical demo, sometimes it’ll be something different – that’s going to help us prove that the technology is ready to go to the next step.”

Prologue is available to wishlist on Steam, but Preface: Undiscovered World is currently available to download and play now, with Gorga asking players to try it out to give the team metrics it can use to study what’s working.

“Even if you spend a few minutes [playing it], that’s going to help us a lot, because we’re going to gather data that’s going to help us understand how the technology behaves in the wild,” Gorga says in the video. “That’s the best help you can give us for now.”