PUBG creator Brendan Greene says he is ‘contemplating’ the blockchain for his subsequent game

Brendan Greene, higher recognized (considerably mockingly) as PlayerUnknown, walked away from PUBG final 12 months to type a brand new studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, and tackle an extremely bold new open world venture known as Artemis. The aim of Artemis is to generate lifelike, dense, world-sized open worlds: To “lend weight to the thought of, ‘You see that mountain? You may climb it.'”

(That, by the way in which, is an outdated quote attributed to Todd Howard in early displays discussing the size of Bethesda’s open-world RPG Skyrim.)

A sprawling open world wherein gamers can wander round and do no matter they need is actually a metaverse by one other title—not less than insofar as we perceive them—which naturally results in ideas of blockchains and NFTs, neither of that are terribly fashionable with most players. In a current interview on Nathan Brown’s Hit Factors weblog, Greene acknowledged the metaversal connection, and the doubtless adverse connotations it’d carry, however mentioned he is not bothered by the opportunity of a adverse response to it.

“I’m simply going to do what I’m going to do,” Greene mentioned. “It’s this factor that we need to create, and it’s going to offer folks plenty of enjoyable, plenty of pleasure, and plenty of significant issues to do. However it doesn’t matter if it’s known as the metaverse. I don’t care what folks need to name it.”

“I do imagine it’s best to be capable of extract worth from a digital place; it needs to be just like the web, where you are able to do stuff that can earn you cash,” he continued. “However it’s not about, like, Chanel and Louis Vuitton. It’s some child known as AwesomePickle promoting cool skins as a result of he understands what folks need.”

Greene made no point out of NFTs within the fast rundown of his ambitions, but it surely got here shut sufficient to the mark that some folks took it to imply that Greene is making a blockchain-based game utilizing NFTs for objects. In response, he took to Twitter to shoot down the belief.

“Not fairly,” Greene tweeted. “We’re contemplating blockchain, or some future evolution of this tech, as a utility inside our digital place, not the muse of it.”

It has been greater than a 12 months since Greene left PUBG Company, however his new venture—and its deliberate precursor, a smaller-scale (however nonetheless large) tech demo known as Prologue—are nonetheless very a lot within the “contemplating” part. Greene attributed a few of that gradual begin to his inexperience in constructing and managing a improvement group, but in addition due to the sheer magnitude of the technological challenges concerned in constructing plausible worlds of the dimensions he envisions.

“I typically say that it’s like we’re constructing a combustion engine within the age of horses,” he mentioned. “Individuals know learn how to breed horses and practice them to run quicker, however that doesn’t scale.”