PlayerUnknown Productions, a new game studio started by Brendan Greene, the mind behind PUBG, has launched its first game in Steam Early Access . While Greene is best known as one of the grandfathers of the battle royale genre, the new game, Prologue: Go Wayback! flips the script entirely, promising an open-world, single-player, survival roguelike. The biggest differentiating feature of Prologue: Go Wayback! is its AI-generated open world and exploration. While Go Wayback is a single-player game, there is no fixed narrative—your only objectives are to survive the elements and reach the weather tower.

Every time you jump into a run of Go Wayback, a new world measuring 64 km² is generated, featuring dynamic weather, a day-night cycle, and a unique map. The open beta also features a custom game creator, with configurable game modes and settings and a map editor that allows players to sketch out various geographic features for the machine learning model to base its world on. PlayerUnknown Productions's machine learning model is supposedly trained on freely available open-source data. It seems as though the game studio is trying to find a way to integrate AI into gaming to enable new experiences without some of the common pitfalls of generative AI, especially when it comes to copyright.