Prologue: Go Wayback! Early Access Opens Up New World After New *

Open worlds don’t get much more open than this. Prologue: Go Wayback! is a single-player survival game with a twist: machine-learning technology generates a whole new world to explore every time you boot up your PC. The first full game from Dutch independent studio PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, Prologue: Go Wayback! is launching in Early Access on November 20th. Intel Gaming Access took a hike into the wilderness with Brendan Greene, founder and Chief Creative Officer at PLAYERUNKNOWN (the studio is named after his online handle), to find out what adventures he has in store for us.

“This game is for people who like to explore, like survival games, but also like to see what’s possible with the latest tech innovations in gaming,” Greene tells us. “Players will experience a 64km² map that they can get lost in. The goal is clear: get to the weather tower—but how long you want to take to get there, if you can find it, is up to the player. Along the way players will find beautiful vistas, tough weather patterns, and tense moments trying to find shelter, warmth, and food.” So it’s no walk in the park? Far from it, says Greene. “Prologue: Go Wayback! mixes moments of beauty and levity with moments where you don’t know if you will freeze or starve before reaching the next shelter. Our survival mechanics stick to being realistic, and it’s meant to be a tough game—you will die and must start over, with the weather being your main ‘enemy’. We’re creating a game where it feels like the world isn’t there for the player, it’s ever changing and has its own routine. Nothing is scripted in that sense; you are a guest in this world.”

An ever-changing world comes with a unique set of player challenges, as Greene explains. “The world changes every time you start a game, so it’s incredibly unlikely you will get the same map twice, meaning you will have to learn the systems of the game, learn how to find shelter, how to forage for food… how to survive. If you do, you might make it to the weather tower.” The game’s beautiful Czech Bohemian-inspired scenery is a far cry from the traditional settings and dangers of roguelike gameplay, and this is deliberate: “We wanted to create a game that wouldn’t emphasize dopamine, but rather have very distinct moments of adrenaline in a non-hostile environment,” Greene affirms. “We don’t have enemies—no monsters are hunting you.” No fantasy opponents here, then; just hazards that are all too real.

Building a game with an endless number of randomly-generated worlds must have had its challenges? “Where do we start?” Greene laughs. “Prologue: Go Wayback! is built using parts of our own Melba technology combined with Unreal, using machine learning (ML) to build the maps. All the assets in the game are made by our talented team, but using ML to generate the terrain meant we had little control over where objects or shelters were spawned, and how this affected the player. This caused quite an interesting challenge for the team. One time, the engine kept creating maps where it would not populate above a certain elevation, but would still put the weather tower up there, making for very, very tough maps to complete. These kinds of challenges make development diverse and fun, while also giving us some good ideas along the way.”

The studio hasn’t been alone on this development journey, as Greene explains: “This is the first time we’ve teamed up with Intel, and it’s been a great experience all round. Implementing Intel^Ⓡ X^e Super-Sampling (X^eSS) was frictionless, and the team at Intel has been incredibly accommodating and nice to work with.” Good to hear we’ve had a hand in making this innovative survival game work. “We use Intel’s powerful tools for debugging and measuring the performance of the game,” Greene continues. “The Intel tools suite is also great for us when creating and improving our internal development tools. When we do new ML models or update our pipeline, it is imperative that we have accurate feedback on performance. This helps our developers to be creative.”

How crucial is PC performance to getting the most out of the game? “Performance is an interesting one for Prologue: Go Wayback!” Greene says. “Our aim has been, consistently, to make our experiences as accessible as possible, but the terrain generation system does have a certain memory requirement. The game runs great on systems with over 32GB of Ram, and we’re in the process of optimizing this further to make it accessible to 16GB systems, and PC Handhelds like the Steam Deck or MSI Claw. This is a continuous process, and—while we are at a good spot at Early Access launch—it will continue through the EA period.”

This may seem like an obvious question for the creator of an explorer game, but… where will you go next? “Prologue: Go Wayback! is the first game in a three-game plan from PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, where we showcase our terrain generation and take what we learn towards Project Artemis, our end-goal as a studio,” Greene reveals. Project Artemis is a platform designed to generate massive online worlds for millions of players at a time. “We will keep on building the framework for planet-sized virtual worlds, preparing to share this with players everywhere. After Prologue: Go Wayback! launches and we’ve gone through Early Access, we will ramp up production on the second title in our three-game plan, iterating on another part of the Project Artemis technology. For now, there are many exciting things happening with Prologue: Go Wayback! in the coming year, and we look forward to building the game with our community, our team, and all of you.”

With that, it’s time to boot up your PC, and get your hiking boots on. Happy trails, gamers.

Buy Prologue: Go Wayback! at Epic Game Store.