Towards the end of last month, Brendan Greene’s studio PlayerUnknown Productions finally launched its new survival simulator into early access. And it’s changed quite a bit in just the few weeks it’s been out.
Prologue: Go Wayback! started with a single mode: survival. In this, you’d get dropped into a new procedurally generated map and have to survive the elements, keep yourself fed and watered, and finally find the lighthouse, which is the only way out of the game. It may sound simple, but there were loads of variables which could greatly help or hinder your chances of success, spawning in the middle of a lake being one such example.
But since it launched into early access at the end of November, the devs have already added a few extra features. “It was through the feedback of people on our servers and in our TeamSpeak at the time that we improved the game mode,” Greene tells me. “At first, I thought, ‘Okay, a nice survival loop would be cool’. But then, with the community’s feedback over the last months, we now have a free run mode.”
Now, instead of surviving long enough to escape the map, players have the option to just keep the game going as long as possible. You can save and come back with the intention of staying on the same map and making it as nice as possible to keep yourself alive.
“The main game mode is going to be pretty difficult,” Greene says. “But objective survival is even harder. There are no cabins, you just have to survive for as long as you can, against the weather, foraging and this kind of stuff.”
But not everyone playing Prologue is interested in making their time in the game as difficult as possible. There have also been calls for an easier mode: “Then we have a free roam mode where it turns off everything, or turns off all health and all that. So you can just wander around the maps.”
This is the kind of game I’d be interested in playing. It may not sound as thrilling, but there are some seriously beautiful views in Prologue, and it seems a shame to waste those on someone who’s slowly starving to death and is desperately hunting down mushrooms.
“I want to build games with the community, rather than for them, because that’s how I got into gaming; I came from modding,” Greene says. “Early Access is the oven. It requires some time in there. It’s used by a lot of bigger games as a kind of open beta. They add a finished game that just needs some balance tweaks and stuff like this, rather than a true beta or even an alpha. But we’re trying to use early access in the way it was meant to be.”
Greene has a few ideas as to what he wants to see in Prologue before they decide to leave early access, but there’s no great rush to add these. The team is instead taking a more holistic approach to progress.
“We have a few of the leads that have worked in more traditional AA or AAA structures or corporate structures, and they say they can’t see going back to working any other way than with the community,” Greene says. “Because it has been so enlightening to them to see how much people really do care about the game.
“There are, of course, marketing deadlines, you’ve got shows to appeal to, and then there’s stock prices, and all kinds of stuff come into the equation. But I’m happy that we’re independent. We have a great team that loves what they’re doing. So I’ve always been like, it’s ready when it’s ready. I don’t want to push out stuff before it’s ready. There are a few comments that it wasn’t really ready yet, but that’s the point of early access: to build a game with the community.”
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