PUBG Creator Brendan Greene Shares His Thoughts On Project Artemis And The Metaverse

Brendan Greene, the architect behind PUBG, shared more information on his new studio's future game, Project Artemis. Speaking to GamesBeat, Greene elaborated more on Prologue--a smaller tech demo project that will be the first step towards realizing Artemis--and contextualized Artemis' relationship to the "metaverse," a currently very buzzy word with very loosely defined boundaries.

Project Artemis, as we learned in a previous interview, is Greene's ambitious open world game that will be the size of the literal planet Earth--a different scale than any open-world project has attempted to capture--and where gameplay will largely be created and driven by players. At a first glance, Greene's vision for Artemis seems to be in line with the metaverse version espoused by Horizon (Facebook's rebrand) and other companies. But Greene was hesitant to tie Artemis so firmly to the word.

"I'm not sure if that’s what I’m building," he told GamesBeat. "I first set out to do a concept [of] what I want to do next. I just knew I wanted to build a big open world. And as we developed the ideas internally, that big world got massive. And right now I just want to find a focus on building this digital place. I don’t even know what the metaverse is meant to be yet. I mean, is it a place? Is it a set of standards?"

But that doesn't mean Greene won't touch anything to do with the metaverse. His studio is conducting research into blockchain technology, and Greene sees it as the cog that will make the expanded digital world work. "Blockchain is of course necessary for the metaverse," Greene stated. "But we're taking things slowly and we're not doing things in a usual way because that's how we achieve a planet-scaled world at a fidelity that I want which is real world.”

"I'm building this digital space that should be accessible by any device you have," Green explained. "It should also be open and I think players should have a voice. We have to set up the world and make sure it’s balanced. But the players can have a voice. Blockchain gives players this kind of vote. But I am very much about open development. I want to share what we are doing. I think sharing this tech with the wider public is the way that we all make a bigger game.”

As for where Prologue is currently, Greene stated that it is still in early stages, and the team is currently focused on developing the engine, Entity Component Systems (ECS). The vision for the tech demo hasn't changed since Greene's last interview in September--Prologue will still be a 64x64 kilometer sandbox for players to experiment with.

It's unknown when Prologue will be available to try out, but Project Artemis certainly is more than a few years away. Greene stated that it could be five years or more until the big project is finished.