Prologue: Go Wayback‘s stripped-back approach to the survival game genre has kept it firmly on my radar. It foregoes monsters and loot-hungry hostiles in favor of the most terrifying predator of all: mother nature. In Prologue, resource scarcity and inclement weather are your biggest problems, to such an extent that it’s every bit a hardcore survival experience as its gnarlier counterparts. Now, just days away from launching into early access, PlayerUnknown Productions has revealed its vision for future updates as active development continues.
Prologue is a little bit like Peak. You start off on a procedurally generated map (though the former’s creates a new seed every single run, as opposed to the latter’s daily rotation), and you need to hike your way up to a final objective. In Peak, it’s the top of the mountain. In Prologue, it’s the weather station. Unlike Peak, however, Prologue is a lone, isolated experience, and its systems are, unsurprisingly, much more sophisticated in scope.
Though Jamie found the game to be “addictively grueling” when he went hands-on for our Prologue preview back in February, at the time he noted that the build was “janky and contained lots of bugs,” and sported “quite outdated” visuals. Nine months later, the game is already looking substantially more polished. Naturally, as an early access title, there’s still a long way to go, and Prologue’s new roadmap reflects that.
Though it’s all very general, there’s a lot to look forward to. Between improved pathing, expanded construction that promises “no limits on creativity,” and entirely new game modes, PlayerUnknown Productions has its work cut out for it over the coming months and years. It’s certainly one of the prettiest survival games I’ve seen, and I hope its gameplay loop reaches the same level of polish.
Prologue, more specifically its machine learning generation system, represents the first pillar in PlayerUnknown Productions’ Project Artemis, a three-game plan that will progressively build towards a sprawling, near-infinite metaverse of possibilities. It’s a ridiculously bold undertaking, with the team working towards building planet-sized worlds at full scale. With this long-term planning in mind, I fully expect to see Prologue’s roadmap fulfilled, lest it set a worrying precedent for what’s to come from the studio.
