PUBG creator has visions of a Valheim building system and races against Dark Souls ghosts for his new survival game

By design, Prologue is a stripped-back, punishing, isolating experience. Dropping a lone player into a vast, randomly generated wilderness and tasking them with surviving and exploring, its perceived simplicity has resulted in some negative responses since its early access launch last month. While it's something PlayerUnknown Productions - the studio formed by PUBG creator Brendan Greene - was prepared for, there are plenty of plans to expand its survival sandbox and offer new experiences to prove critics wrong. In an interview with Greene, I quiz him on some of the features teased in its early access roadmap, extra additions he'd love to see arrive in the game, and how long it'll take to reach the final version of Prologue.

Right now, there are three official ways to play Prologue. Go Wayback is its core mode, tasking you with navigating from a starting cabin to a weather tower while not succumbing to the elements. Objective: Survival is even more intense - an endless gauntlet that will push hardcore fans of the best survival games to their limit as they attempt to stay alive for the longest time possible. Finally, Free Roam lets you load up a new map and explore without the need of food, water, and shelter from severe weather. A new settings menu also lets you tinker with parameters of these modes.

However, there are grander plans on Prologue's roadmap, and the one that intrigues me most revolves around "expanded construction." I ask Greene if this is going to allow players to build their own shelters on the fly or create elaborate bases like so many of its survival game rivals.

"I want to be able to build a tree house and survive a storm in a tree house," he fantasizes. "Trees are just effects right now, so I'm not sure there's proper geometry, so it could be hard… But [overall] the aim is to have a building system that feels free form enough that you can really build whatever you want. Initially, [you can] sort of scrape together cabins, or scrape together structures in a forest in the middle of a storm, so you can protect yourself. But I really want to give people the freedom, so it's more like [a] creative mode - we just have to do some testing with how many planks [of wood] you can spawn before it kills your CPU and that kind of stuff. But it's all about that balance; we really want to make it as freeform as possible. So it's not so much worrying about being realistic, more about creativity."

"I referenced Valheim as [a game with a] really interesting building mechanic that is freeform enough that allows you to create the Millennium Falcon," Greene adds. "So this kind of freedom is the kind of stuff I want in the game."

New modes are also coming, and Greene has been playing one that he's extremely excited about, but would be "killed" by his team if he was to share details at this stage. He does, however, let me in on an idea he's keen to implement at some point in the future.

"My big want is to get some kind of, not full multiplayer, but kind of like Dark Souls, where you play with a ghost of your friend. So we already now have deterministic [elements], so if you spin up the same seed with your friend, you should get the same weather, you should get the same loot, and you should get the same cabins […] I'm not sure about the loot yet, I don't think the loot is exactly the same. But the aim would be that you and your friend can play the game together and have the same experience while not playing fully multiplayer. But maybe you see a ghost of your friend that you can race across the map."

I ask if that means PlayerUnknown Productions has decided against proper, online multiplayer for Prologue, despite co-op play being such a big draw for some of its big survival rivals.

"It's not that [multiplayer] is off the table, it's that with the way we generate our worlds, they have to be 100% deterministic for every player, so every player gets the same world. We're nearly there." He adds that this would "require a lot of rewriting" and is going to take some time, but it's certainly a possibility for Prologue in the future. Greene says that he's aiming for three DLC expansions for the game once early access is over, and that multiplayer will probably be a DLC 3 feature, so towards the very tail end of Prologue's development.

As for how long it'll stay in early access, Greene says it'll last for "about a year." The pieces of DLC that'll follow will not only add new features and systems, but they'll also be "telling a bit more of the story" behind Prologue. He says that as the narrative and the survival sandbox expands, the potential for proper missions and quests may emerge, but he says that's contingent on PlayerUnknown Productions making its world generation more believable and convincing.

"It's a beautiful world, but [right now] it's a bunch of cabins plopped down. I want to see pathing. I want to see infrastructure. I want to see [evidence of] human life attached to the world as well."