PUBG Creator’s AI-Generated Roguelike Survival Hits Steam Early Access Next Month, Aiming for a Realistic Minecraft for Millions

Brendan 'PlayerUnknown' Greene is finally shipping something new next month, and it is not another battle royale. His independent studio, PlayerUnknown Productions (separate from PUBG publisher Krafton), is rolling out a single-player survival experiment with a mouthful of a name: Prologue: Go WayBack. It is the first of three stepping-stone projects on the road to Greene's giant do-everything survival world, Project Artemis.

Quick basics

• Launch: Steam Early Access on November 20
• Price: $20
• Format: Single-player survival with roguelike elements
• Hook: Every run generates a fresh 64 km² map on your PC using an in-house machine-learning tool, then populates it procedurally in Unreal Engine 5
• Tools: Built-in map editor; you can also import an image as the starting shape for a world
• Studio: PlayerUnknown Productions, not owned by Krafton
• Demo: A slice popped up during Steam Next Fest earlier this year

So what does it play like?

Based on the Next Fest build, this is a slower, more tactile first-person survival loop that makes big moments out of tiny tasks. Even making a campfire feels like an achievement. There are no glowing breadcrumbs or objective markers; the point is to pay attention. You can also just spin up a free-roam save and go for a long walk in the wilderness if that is your thing.

The 'new world every time' pitch

Prologue: Go WayBack leans hard on artist-guided machine learning to generate its terrain. The studio is not doing the content-scrape shortcut you see in low-effort AI shovelware; the team says its in-house model is trained only on publicly available, open-source data and is vetted to avoid copyrighted material. That model spits out the base terrain in UE5, then the game layers in custom trees, rivers, rocks, and hills. Crucially, the whole map-generation step happens locally on your machine, offline, whenever you start a new run.

"A brand new 64km2 world is generated on your PC every time you start the game."

If you are thinking that sounds spiritually similar to Minecraft's seeds, you are not far off, though this is ML-guided terrain synthesis rather than pure procedural RNG. The studio's marketing mantra here is basically 'a new map every time you play,' and that is the roguelike angle.

Where this is going

This is not just a one-off. Prologue: Go WayBack is the first of three planned releases aimed at the tech and design problems behind Project Artemis, Greene's long-term dream of a dynamic survival ecosystem that can host millions of players. He has previously framed the destination as a kind of 'realistic Minecraft,' and it is still years away from even starting to gel. If Hello Games building Light No Fire struck you as bold, Artemis is swinging even bigger in scope.

Under the hood: Melba and a playable tech demo

To make Artemis viable, the team is building its own engine, Melba. You can actually poke at the underlying tech right now in a continually updated playable demo called Preface: Undiscovered World. The studio is positioning the Early Access release of Prologue as a meaningful milestone on that R&D path. Translation: this is the kind of foundational work you usually bankroll with massive hit money.

Greene has been blunt about the ambition here, even contrasting his Earth-sized sandbox concept against other big-swing survival projects: he is not chasing a traditional game loop so much as a living digital place. Whether Prologue: Go WayBack delivers a compelling small-scale version of that idea next month is the interesting part.