Brendan Greene says his metaverse is different from the rest, and that his project will be a big hit if it ever gets made…

PlayerUnknown’s Productions is Greene’s own studio, which is currently working on Project Artemis. It’s a procedurally generated, Earth-sized world simulation. Back in March of last year, Greene didn’t call it a game, although he did admit that it will have gameplay elements and that they plan to make a survivalist explorer civilization mode out of it, because he also asked what else could be done with this huge world. You have to give him credit for that.

But Greene has now talked more about this project in an interview with IGN, and it still seems decidedly mysterious: “I hesitate to talk about it because it’s such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don’t think anybody else is doing it. I think everybody’s building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some point in the future, maybe if we’re lucky, but it’s not the metaverse. Look, the Metaverse is a 3D Internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all run on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that’s what I’m trying to do with Artemis.

The seed system gives us, I think, 4.2 billion possible maps, but maybe millions of them would be interesting, I’m not sure yet… But this kind of technology is really cool because we see it being shaped every day with the artists. They’re going, “Let’s try this, let’s update the masks we use for the river to this so we can generate this a little bit differently. And they learn how to use the technology with us, which is just great to see. The metaverse has to have millions of people, and client-side servers, you’re never going to get that. You might get a few thousand, maybe 10,000 if you’re lucky, but that’s attacking the problem at the wrong end, which is solving the simulation locally, which is what we’ve done with Preface, and then you can scale to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, hopefully,” Greene said.

Artemis is her third project. The first, Prologue, is a test of AI-based technology, and Greene says that every time you press play, you get a new area in this survival game. The second project, Project Two, seems to be another stress test where you basically have to think of an Earth-sized RTS.

Pretty ambitious plans… let’s hope we don’t have to wait as long for it as for Star Citizen!

Source: PCGamer