‘We didn’t have a serious plan’: The hardest part of creating Go Wayback, according to Brendan Greene, was just figuring out if it could actually work
Prologue: Go Wayback! is an upcoming survival game made by PlayerUnknown Productions, the devs behind PUBG. It’s pretty hard going, with an unforgiving environment and survival mechanics like hunger, thirst, and temperature all constantly on your back, making it harder to cross the rocky and confusing terrain.
But its difficulty isn’t actually the main appeal of Prologue; it’s probably the fact that its map, which is randomly generated, is going to be 100×100 kilometres. It’s an impressive bid to make a massive, realistic world for a survival game to be set in, but it’s also no easy task.
“We didn’t have a serious plan,” creator Brendan Greene says in an interview with Epic Games. “The leadership team I had at the start, up until a year and a half ago, wasn’t the right team to lead the studio. They didn’t have enough experience making games. I don’t think they fully accepted the vision from my side. I was a photographer, graphic designer, and then someone gave me a bunch of money and a studio. I had very little experience, so there’s a deep learning curve.
“They sat down and went, ‘Can we do this? Here’s the vision. [Greene] wants to do millions of players, Earth-scale worlds—basically a digital place,'” he says. “After 10 minutes of hemming and hawing, they were like ‘Oh wow, we can do this,’ and they came back with a plan.”
Prologue is set to launch into Early Access soon, with the idea being that players get to test out all the maps and see if the generative AI, which helps make a new map every time a player launches the game, is up to scratch.
“This is a long, one-plus-year Early Access,” director Scott Davidson says. “Then a couple of years of post-full-launch support. We haven’t figured it out fully.” While what Early Access will look like is not entirely nailed down, Greene makes it clear that the main goal is just to make enough money to fund the second game and the next stage of Project Artemis.
“We have Go Wayback, which will fund us into Game Two, hopefully. We’re also looking at raising funding at the moment,” Greene says. “I want to insulate the team from having to worry about making products to sell, because that often destroys some really good ideas.”
Even if it hasn’t been tested by the general public yet, Greene seems to think it’ll do just fine: “I could see the possibility of the platform, and especially emergence. That’s what made me fall in love. Seeing this kind of survival game where you tell your own story, rather than it being a path you’re meant to follow, filled me with a lot of excitement.
“I always wanted to do a bigger survival game, because I loved what happens in Rust and this emergent space,” Greene continues. “I thought with 100×100 kilometres, you could do trade routes, or if there was a mountain where you knew there was iron, you could maybe become a salesperson for iron and become very wealthy that way, or a warlord.”
From what I played of Prologue, I’m not really sure how you’d manage to become a warlord. I spent most of my time doing up a cabin I found and getting scared by my own shadow, so again, not sure what the naked and afraid to warlord pipeline looks like, but I have no doubt someone out there could probably nail it.
Lofty, evil warlord ambitions aside, Prologue’s Early Access will hopefully just provide players with a fun, decent survival experience. “I just want to deliver something that is stable and enjoyable,” Greene says. “The gameplay is there. It still needs polish. It still needs balance. But I enjoy playing it, and there’s not a whole lot of games I enjoy playing.”
