Brendan Greene, better known (somewhat ironically) as PlayerUnknown, walked away from PUBG last year to form a new studio (opens in a new tab)PlayerUnknown Productions, and take on an incredibly ambitious new open world project called Artemis (opens in a new tab). The goal of Artemis is to generate realistic, dense, world-sized open worlds: To “emphasize the idea of, ‘See that mountain? You can climb it’.”
(By the way, there’s an old quote attributed to Todd Howard in early presentations discussing the scope of Bethesda’s open-world RPG Skyrim.)
A vast open world where players can wander around and do whatever they want is really a metaverse by another name – at least as far as we understand them (opens in a new tab)– which naturally leads to thoughts of blockchains and NFTs, neither of which are very popular with most players. In a recent interview on Nathan Brown’s Hit Points (opens in a new tab) blog, Greene acknowledged the metaversal connection, and the potentially negative connotations it can have, but said he is not bothered by the possibility of a negative reaction to it.
“I’m just going to do what I’m going to do,” Greene said. “There’s this thing we want to create, and it’s going to give people a lot of fun, a lot of joy, and a lot of meaningful things to do. But it doesn’t matter if it’s called the metaverse. I don’t care what people want call it.”
“I think you should be able to extract value from a digital place; it has to be like the internet, where you can do things that will make you money,” he continued. “But it’s not about Chanel and Louis Vuitton. It’s a kid named AwesomePickle who sells cool skins because he understands what people want.”
Greene didn’t mention NFTs in the quick summary of his ambitions, but it came close enough that some took it as Greene making a blockchain-based game using NFTs for commodities. In response, he took to Twitter to shoot down the assumption.
“Not quite,” Greene tweeted. “We consider blockchain, or a future development of this technology, as a tool in our digital space, not the foundation of it.”
Not completely. We consider blockchain, or a future development of this technology, as a tool in our digital space, not the foundation of it. https://t.co/ZklHxtMI6528 September 2022
It’s been more than a year since Greene left PUBG Corporation, but his new project — and its planned predecessor, a smaller-scale (but still massive) tech demo called Prologue — are still very much in the “review” phase. Greene attributed some of the slow start to his inexperience in building and leading a development team, but also to the scale of the technological challenges involved in building believable worlds of the size he envisions.
“I often say it’s like we’re building an internal combustion engine in the age of the horse,” he said. “People know how to breed horses and train them to run faster, but it doesn’t scale.”
