PlayerUnknown’s Prologue: Go Wayback is an enchanting exploration sim tossed on a sea of metaverse imagineering
Buried in Brendan Greene and PlayerUnknown Productions’ billowing, three-part, decade-long effort to build some kind of “3D internet” there is a ramshackle but thoughtful Unreal Engine game about wilderness survival and orienteering. Catchily titled Prologue: Go Wayback! and due for Early Access launch this spring, it’s a game about finding a radio tower on a 64km2 map, generated based on a mix of in-house art and public access landscape data fed through the developer’s in-house machine learning technology.
I had a chance to try a WIP build earlier this month, and came away quite beguiled. The trouble is, whatever pleasure Go Wayback has to offer floats on the rapids of an alternately incoherent and obnoxious desire to create a platter of connected gameworlds based on machine learning, which Greene – once the developer of pioneering battle royale PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – variously and giddily compares to Steam, Ready Player One, holodecks, Rust and Minecraft.
Go Wayback doesn’t feel nearly that grandiose in the moment. It feels quiet, crafty and receptive to deduction. In the demo I played, each run began inside a randomly placed forest cabin, with a pan of water bubbling on a stove ring nearby. I like that pan of water. It’s a pleasing little designer’s goad: was somebody making tea, before you arrived? Sterilising ground water? You hear a generator throbbing outside and you think, ah, I should probably turn off the stove to avoid wasting power, and then you discover that each ring on the stove can be flicked on or off individually. Nice.
The first cabin presents you with a bunch of tools for navigation and survival, some of which have several uses to discover through creative play. These include a torch, ferro rods for kindling fires, binoculars, a physical map, and a compass. There’s a thick padded coat hanging on the door, and you’ll definitely need that when the game’s weather simulation takes a turn for the worst.
The initial challenge is fitting all the kit into your Resident Evil-style grid inventory alongside food and water (and also, dealing with the current inventory system’s unwieldiness, when trying to swap objects into and out of your item hotbar). The default inventory size means that you’ll likely need to leave at least one navigational instrument behind, which essentially means choosing a handicap – perhaps you’ll try to memorise the paper map, or even trace it on actual paper, so you can free up some inventory blocks for tinned food. Again, I like the unassuming deftness of all this.
Having readied yourself for the elements, you amble through the door and find yourself in a wilderness of leafmulch, wildflowers, and boulders modelled on the “Bohemian Switzerland” parklands of the Czech Republic. If you’re me, you head for the nearest hilltop to see if you can spy the radio tower. Then you pick a likely direction and start trudging, doing your best not to get turned around by the intervening geography. Slight deviations to, say, avoid boggy areas often prove perilous, because it’s so easy to lose your bearings: there’s no minimap and no waypointing system to keep you sailing true.
Little environmental clues tally up in your head, stockpiling themselves for subsequent runs. One thing I noticed early is that moss grows on the northern flanks of tree trunks. Armed with that woodland lore, I felt empowered to leave my compass behind on my second and third attempts – my first having ended with a trip over a cliffedge in darkness. Night in the game can be impenetrable even if you do have a torch, but given a clear sky, you might scry your way by starlight. During nocturnal thunderstorms, lightning bolts reveal the landscape in stop-motion bursts.
In amongst all these things, there’s some gentle mystery, though the choice of scenery is a bit arbitrary. I don’t think PUP have any particular opinion on the Czech countryside, other than that the landscape and latitude fit their requirements for a game of hardy, picturesque exploration. There’s a stock-footage feel to some of Go Wayback, perhaps a touch of Center Parcs. But then you turn on a transistor radio while walking and are treated to some curiously specific electronica that synchs to your footsteps, and you start to wonder about the grand design.
There is certainly a grand design here, but it’s more about the role Go Wayback will play in the aforesaid “3D internet” stuff, which I find pretty draining to describe. To recap, Go Wayback is the first of three games that are sort of one big rolling exercise in cultivating the technology for a bunch of “interoperable” gameworlds. As Brendan Greene explained to me after my hands-on, it paves the way for Artemis, which will run on the studio’s own Melba engine, with the promise of much larger generated maps and “millions” of players per session. As for the eventual “Game Three” – this, seemingly, will be the capstone for an open-ended network of holodecky fantasies in which people can generate, modify, share and monetise worlds or bits of worlds via means yet to be fully described.
Inasmuch as these projects have a social or political dimension, it’s all apparently to do with helping people talk to each other. “I do believe that the world’s getting more isolated,” Greene told me. “I think, like most people, live in small boxes with noise all day. And I think having a shared space where you can go and together or alone, and do all the things you can do in the real world in this virtual space – I think that’s an important thing to have, because we are getting more and more isolated, you know, with the ravages of climate change on the horizon.
“I think at the start of every disaster movie, there’s some scientist telling you there’s problems coming, and everyone ignores them,” he continued. “There’s a bunch of scientists now going, ‘Guys, wake the fuck up’, and everyone’s going, ‘Oh, don’t look up’. It just worries me a little bit. So I think having a shared space that’s like a 3D internet, where we can come together if we are more isolated – I think it’s important, but that’s more the grand vision than having a political opinion.”
Greene estimates that the journey from Go Wayback to Game Three will take 10 years, or around three years per project. As for business models, he’s thinking about free-to-play with microtransactions, but also regards the blockchain as “an interesting financial layer that we might use in the future at some stage, if it makes sense”. Among the elephants in the room here are the game’s players, who will get a chance to vote on features for Go Wayback as it evolves through early access. During our interview, Greene cited the development of survival game Rust as a key influence, in that the developers will broadly consider these player votes non-binding.
Greene also cited Ready Player One, a cloying male nerd fantasy popular among web3 enthusiasts, as an influence both on the studio’s metaversal ambitions and (more positively) his mistrust of how other corporations view the much billy-banged metaverse concept as an excuse to set up another generation of proprietary walled gardens. His “3D internet” will be different. “That book warns you of the corporation that controls it all, which, you know, can’t anyone see that?” he told me, “And all these corporations are trying to create these bubbles.”
Greene wants people to do as they please with whatever technologies and tools emerges from Go Wayback and Artemis. Melba will be open source, and Greene suggests that people could tinker with the engine using familiar tools such as Blender, though he also thinks that a lot of the relevant gadgetry has yet to be invented. “Ultimately, you know, I want the public to build the rest, but I’m not going to force it to do it – it’s not a content creation platform,” Greene went on. “We’re giving you examples of what’s possible with experiences that we hope you enjoy. And if you want to use our tech to build other experiences, great, and they’ll all talk to each other, and you’ll be able to transfer stuff between them.”
Which brings us to the possibility of PUP’s games letting you buy and sell things with cryptocurrency. Greene seems quite keen on the blockchain, but also mindful that many people aren’t, given the technology’s association with snake oil merchants and ruinous energy consumption. “Should we go down that route? Even with the current plan we have, I don’t plan on opening the economy up to the outer world probably till Game Three,” he told me. “We have to make sure it’s robust enough to deal with what we have in game initially, without opening it up to the wider public, right? I’m not going to be tokenizing it from the start, because that’s just not the right way to do it.”
Is that the kind of addition Go Wayback’s players might be invited to vote on, I asked?
“Oh, they have to have input,” Greene said. “But it depends on who they’re looking at it for, if they’re looking at it for the wider public, or for themselves. But I think, like for me, it has to be fair and equitable. Everyone has to have the same start, and have the same opportunity to get reward out of the system for the same amount of work. So that means, like, a stable currency, that’s the way it has to be. So I will take feedback from the community, probably from the marketplace, but that’s all in the scope of the plan that we’ll work with them on, every step of the way.”
OK then.
I confess, the more I hear the sourer I feel about PlayerUnknown Productions’ grand ambitions. Let’s start with some familiar topline objections to the metaverse concept. I don’t think we need a “3D internet”. I think the internet has enough dimensions. Have you ever gone beyond page 3 of Google? It’s an absolute bloody circus down there.
If there are problems with corporations owning huge chunks of the territory, the obvious way to address that is by lessening the power of corporations, not adding a disruptive new technology to the pile. Blockchain tech in particular is often offered as a kind of vehicle for public ownership, side-stepping traditional monetary institutions. In practice, it has proven time and again to be an enabler for the most cut-throat of pyramid schemers. And if people are stuck “in small boxes with noise all day”, unable to work collectively in the face of an existential terror like climate change, the solution perhaps isn’t to increase the connectivity and immersiveness of the box.
The key question, I guess, is how “open” the Melba tech will prove in practice, and if it’s successful, whether it will remain “open” or end up being distorted and enshittified by monetisation, as has happened to social media. PlayerUnknown Productions apparently have plenty of seed funding, so clearly a bunch of investors think this funky group holodeck approach is a lucrative venture, rather than a charitable donation to the architecture of online discourse.
You might be wondering what’s happened to that nice survival exploration game we were talking about, around 700 words ago. The problem with Go Wayback forming part of a wider metaverse project is that Go Wayback itself starts to feel kind of irrelevant. Or worse, like a Trojan horse for the above web3 initiatives. I’m still trying to decide how much the survival game format really matters to Greene, the former Arma modder who is among the few people who can half-credibly claim to have created an entire genre. He talks enthusiastically about additions such as flammability for cabins, and hints at lore he’s writing that justifies the awkward name. Still, it feels like the overarching tech and vision come first.
“I first thought, OK, I want to do 100 kilometre maps – this was back when I was at Krafton [before August 2021],” Greene explained to me. “We discovered the way to do one over 100 kilometres was to do it generatively, rather than hand-created. So then I thought, OK, well, if I can generate a new map every time you press play, what’s the easiest way to test this? I thought: a survival game.”
I personally think of survival simulation as the quintessential eco-apocalypse nostalgia-fantasy, in that it is all about going “back to nature” and starting afresh. Does that ring true for Greene, given his previous comments about climate change? Is that perhaps why this genre resonated with him? It doesn’t appear so.
“I wasn’t thinking of anything other than what is the simplest way to test our tech,” he commented. “And that’s really where it came from, right? We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here, the survival loop. The survival mechanics are pretty much industry standard, what most people use, because the aim is not to reinvent the survival genre. It’s having a new world every time you press play.”
Again, I quite like Go Wayback in itself, though I’m suspicious of its machine learning. This calls upon a mixture of in-house art, publicly available GIS (geographic information system) data, and satellite photography sourced from agencies such as NASA. The developers have confirmed with me that they have the legal rights to all the data they’re using to “train” the terrain generator. I’ve got a separate feature in the works about how they’re doing it, which will make connections to what I am tempted to call the “lost magic” of “pre-gen-AI” procedurally generated worlds.
Among the things PUP have added recently are rivers, which are very useful landmarks. I had the chance to swim in one at the close of my demo – a midnight crossing that would have been pretty unwise if the developers had managed to implement temperature loss from wet clothes in the build at hand. I could barely see anything as I paddled, but then a thunderstorm set in, and the opposite shore appeared to me in flashes of rainswept canopy and hillside. I was reminded, very distantly, of swimming in a lake once during a shower, and finding myself adrift in a seethe of erupting droplets, as though every particle of water had decided to jump for joy simultaneously. I hope that, in amongst all the metaversing, Go Wayback can find its way to something of the same joy.