PUBG creator shows off giant open world, talks of planet-sized game world

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Brendan Greene presents a demo that calculates gigantic AI open worlds in real time. The technology is said to power his new survival game.

PUBG creator Brendan Greene is back with a sign of life from Artemis Prologue. The experimental survival game is supposed to offer open worlds in huge dimensions – and use real-time AI calculation for this.

Greene now shows a video demo on Twitter of what such an open world could look like. The video serves as a proof of concept, i.e. as evidence that the idea is feasible in principle. Here you can see the almost unbelievable dimensions that Greene describes as a planet-sized game world:

The technology is to be turned into a survival game (Project Artemis) in the future, in which the players fight in their thousands against all odds to survive. First, however, a kind of playable tech demo is to be released with Prologue.

How big is the game world?

Brendan Greene speaks of 64 x 64 kilometres, i.e. over 4,000 square kilometres in area. The camera first shows a detailed forest environment from the first-person perspective before rising high and flying far away. Then, at a distant point, the view lowers back down to ground level.

Here you can see how the open world is calculated again: Details such as the undergrowth, rocks and associated textures are delayed in loading. A problem that is less noticeable at walking speed when the vegetation is loaded in the distance.

But what’s it all about? In Greene’s own words:

Our goal is to build deep, systemic playgrounds hundreds of kilometres wide and populated by thousands of players.

Judging by what we’ve seen so far, a major threat to players’ virtual lives is likely to be getting lost in the endless expanse of the world. Imagine the whole thing with dynamic weather and day/night changes. The teaser trailer shows how atmospheric Greene imagines the finished game to be:

In addition to the untouched nature, the game is also supposed to contain special places. Here, Brendan Playerunknown Greene compares an earlier and a more recent version of the game:

Project Artemis is probably still far away from a release date. Currently, the developer is looking for personnel (strengthening) for its studio Playerunknown Productions in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The demo Prologue is to be released much earlier. But a concrete release date is still missing for this as well.