PUBG Creator Brendan Greene Defends Machine Learning Use While Criticizing Generative AI in Gaming

PUBG's creator is betting big on machine learning for his next game

Brendan Greene, better known by his only pseudonym PlayerUnknown, is launching his next game later this week. He spun up PlayerUnknown Productions after moving away from PUBG, the battle royale sensation he created, in 2019. Six years and several studio leadership shake-ups later, the studio will release survival game Prologue: Go Wayback! Into early access on November 20. It's supposed to be the first part of a three-game grand plan that will culminate with a world-scale MMO. To accomplish that lofty goal for what the studio currently calls Project Artemis, Greene believes utilizing machine learning is necessary. As such, Prologue: Go Wayback! is being used as a training ground for a machine learning model to generate a height map for a survival game with a nearly 25-square-mile world. The use of both generative AI and machine learning in video games is currently a hot-button issue. To grok exactly how machine learning is being used in his next game, I hopped on a call with PlayerUnknown himself to learn more about machine learning's role in Prologue: Go Wayback!, Greene's hopes for the tech, and the ethics of its broader use in the game industry. How Prologue: Go Wayback! Uses machine learning Billions of height maps, generated on your PC In Prologue: Go Wayback!, the player's goal is to navigate from a starting cabin to a weather tower on the other side of a generated map. In typical survival game fashion, you have to account for your own character's health to make sure you get there alive. There are no enemies in the game, only the weather and the terrain. It's solely single-player for now, although Greene told me he was open to adding multiplayer in a DLC. Greene was attracted to this survival genre for this project as it aligned with his technological goal for the project: generating world terrains locally in real time with machine learning. Most survival games use some form of procedural generation to craft the world, using tools like Unreal Engine 5's Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG). PlayerUnknown Productions also uses those tools for Prologue: Go Wayback!, but builds on top of a terrain layer generated locally on your PC using machine learning. That comes out in the form of a black-and-white image that determines where elements like rivers and mountains should go and what shape they should take. The machine learning model was created with open-source data from agencies like the ESA and NASA and does not have an always-online requirement. Above, you can see the images generated via machine learning that Prologue: Go Wayback! builds its world on. Greene broke down how this Guided Generation process works in more granular detail to me: "What we're using machine learning for in Prologue: Go Wayback! is that it generates the height map of the world. It's called Guided Generation. We have a river schematic. We started off with just splines in Blender of where rivers might look like it could go. From that black and white image that tells you where the water is with white, it generates a height map for the world or for the terrain from that...It's really just generating that base layer, and then we put it into Unreal and use a bunch of typical procedural generation systems like PCG and stuff to populate the world with assets like trees, the foliage, and the cabins." To create those plants, rocks, and buildings, Greene also still sees a place for environment artists in his company. "We have environment artists because they still have to design the scenes that Unreal's PCG system uses to populate the map," he explains. "All we're doing is just generating the base ground layer, and that's populated using traditional procedural systems, which most studios use." Why Prologue: Go Wayback! needs to use machine learning The end goal: Project Artemis While Prologue: Go Wayback! is primarily developed in Unreal Engine 5, the hope is that these learnings can be applied to PlayerUnknown Productions' proprietary engine Melba. More specifically, Melba will be used to power Project Artemis, a world-scale MMO that is Greene's current white whale as a game developer. One day, he'd love for Artemis to possibly become an open-source engine where you can use machine learningto create not just height maps, but population maps as well. "Our models need to be deterministic because if the goal is to build an earth-scale world, where do you store the data? You can't, it's just so much data if you're building an Earth-scale world with millions of players, so that world has to be essentially a generative world," Greene explains. He's thinking about making something even more ambitious than Light No Fire from Hello Games, a world-sized MMO that can support millions of players as they explore, create their own economies, and hopefully have fun somewhere in that process. "If you're building a world with millions of players, it has to be done locally with a peer-to-peer connection." I've been around the game industry long enough that I'm always a bit skeptical of ten-year plans that seem to prioritize technology over game design. That said, PlayerUnknown Productions is at least not staying in the realm of lofty promises and is actually delivering games ahead of Project Artemis, making its creation in the future more possible. In Greene's mind, being able to generate terrain locally without servers is a necessity for Project Artemis to ever see the light of day. "Most image generation models require very large server farms to generate these things. We do it all locally on the GPU in about 60 seconds or so. It's a very quick process because it's just a 2048 by 2048 pixel height map that's a black and white image. That can be done locally. With all the stuff we're building with machine learning, it's leveraging it client-side to make stuff more efficient, so you can generate more locally and not have to worry about having servers to do this for you. If you're building a world with millions of players, it has to be done locally with a peer-to-peer connection." When Greene took a step back and explained his ambitions for Project Artemis, it became more understandable why he embraced deterministic machine learning for Prologue: Go Wayback! He also seems concerned with creating playable builds and finding the fun in his games, which isn't always the case with machine learning and AI-first projects. Still, there are ethical dilemmas hanging over the project's head. The ethics of using machine learning for game development Greene doesn't think this tech will cost game developers their jobs Over the past month, we've seen backlash to the use of generative AI in games like Arc Raiders and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Prologue: Go Wayback!'s use of machine learning technically involves a generated image, but it's for terrain mapping based on open-sourced data. It's done locally, too, so it doesn't rely on problematic server farms to generate that terrain map. In that way, Prologue: Go Wayback! is more ethical than many other AI projects. Still, if Melba's open-source future Greene hopes for becomes a reality, one can't help but question if this machine learning technology could eventually put developers out of a job. Greene stressed "it's not that kind of tech" when pressed about that possibility of Prologue: Go Wayback!'s machine learning techniques potentially putting game developers out of a job. That said, Greene did go on to lean into some questionable terminology I've heard in AI spaces, saying that this machine learning technology could allow "smaller teams of artists to iterate on the world a lot quicker." It's Greene's hope that doing so would "allow teams to focus on the gameplay loops and systems that are in the world." "Think of it like an orchestra. Instead of having someone playing a violin, they now just conduct the orchestra." For his part, PlayerUnknown Productions has embraced that in recent years during development while actively listening to its community. If a corporation like EA, Ubisoft, or Microsoft began to use the technology, I don't think I'd be able to say the same. Nowadays, any and all advancements in AI and machine learning in game development should be met with a healthy amount of skepticism until the nuances of the situation are hashed out and the safety of game developers is ensured. Green compares his studio's use of machine learning to being the conductor of an orchestra, rather than a musician within the ensemble. "Think of it like an orchestra. Instead of having someone playing a violin, they now just conduct the orchestra. They know where all the trees and stuff should go, and the machine learning agent just put it together. But we still have to make all the assets, write the music. It just plays it." While PlayerUnknown Productions is currently operating with a full orchestra, Greene's comments suggest that the conductor is much more important than the violinist, which might become hard to get on board with if the violinist's solo ever comes. Even though PlayerUnknown Productions isn't costing its own employees jobs by developing this tech, part of me can't help but raise an eyebrow when I hear Greene say this tech can make game development "easier" with "smaller teams." A critical moment in the history of machine learning's use in game development Who is more important, the conductor or the musician? Prologue: Go Wayback! is shaping up to be a fascinating first outing for Greene's studio. It's betting big on machine learning technology that many people, myself included, are skeptical of because of its ethical implications. I can see how machine learning may have more of a place in game development than generative AI, although I still see plenty of worrying problems that will always prevent me from blindly embracing it. PlayerUnknown Productions may be testing machine learning technology in a fairly ethical way for Prologue: Go Wayback!, but will a gaming conglomerate do the same if it were to use the studio's technology in a future where it goes open source? Will it be used to empower design freedom, as Greene hopes, or will it be used as a justification to hire fewer developers who can make real, meaningful art that resonates with people? I don't expect this game to have all the answers, but that is a question that will continue to loom over games like Prologue: Go Wayback! because of the bad blood left behind by the more egregious likes of Arc Raiders and Black Ops 7. For now, machine learning is just being used for a height map in Prologue: Go Wayback!, which we've yet to see the critical and audience reception to. If Greene's big bet on machine learning pays off, we could be playing a much different tune (or none at all) on our violins ten years from now.

"I've been really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff" - PUBG creator Brendan Greene distances himself from investor Krafton's controversial 'AI first' mandate

Brendan Greene, the creator of PUBG, better known by his alias PlayerUnknown, has said he's "heartened" to see see people rally against the use of generative AI when used to make games. His comments came while responding to questions about whether his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions, uses generative AI to power the world-generating technology it's currently working on, which he one day hopes will generate Earth-sized planets that millions of people can play on. "We don't use LLMs [large language models] so I'm not super worried [about backlash]," Greene told me. "LLMS have their uses, but there were chatbots in the 60s and 70s that achieved a lot of similar things. So I'm not super worried there. The systems we're building are to enable the artists to sculpt the worlds how they want. It's like an orchestra: we can be either a violin player or we can be the conductor, where you know what everything does, and you just have some levers you can pull and it creates worlds pretty quickly. "I've been really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff," he added. "It's good to see that gamers go: 'No - if it's not built by artists, I don't want to see it.' So that's been really great to see. So I'm not super worried, because I think we're using it in the right way. I think we're using it in a way that enables you to create worlds quicker, rather than taking away the jobs of artists." "It's good to see that gamers go: 'No - if it's not built by artists, I don't want to see it" Greene's remarks take on an additional edge given the links his studio has to Krafton, the South Korean company that controversially announced a company-wide 'AI first' mandate and entered a voluntary redundancy period recently where anyone who didn't want to be a part of it could get out. PlayerUnknown Productions began life as a Krafton 'special projects' team that Greene set up after leaving the PUBG project in 2019. "What we got up to in special projects was the first parts of what we're doing now in this three-game plan," he explained to me. "So that was the start of PlayerUnknown Productions and then after a few years, I asked to go out on my own and they supported me, and we birthed PlayerUnknown Productions." The key piece of information there is "they supported me" because Krafton remains an investor in PlayerUnknown Productions today. And why would Krafton invest in a studio and technology if it didn't align with its future goals? "As a fully independent studio, our overall goals at PlayerUnknown Productions are not influenced by Krafton's chosen strategy," Greene told me in a follow-up email after our call. "While Krafton remains a minority stakeholder in our studio, their internal operations are separate from ours since 2021. "Project Artemis and our three-game plan are being developed independently by us and we have been working on our plans for some time now. "While we are doing technological research into areas like machine learning to give our artists tools to generate worlds at greater scale using local GPU compute, our focus is on using technology to solve problems of scale for players to enjoy bigger and more emergent worlds." "Our overall goals at PlayerUnknown Productions are not influenced by Krafton's chosen strategy" The three-game plan he mentioned is already significantly under way. Game-one, Prologue: Go Wayback!, launches in early access on 20th November. It's a survival and orienteering game about weathering the elements and finding your way through a forested wilderness, while not starving or freezing or otherwise dying in a variety of ways. But really it's a demonstration of terrain-level world generation. In a minute or so the game builds a unique and detailed world for you to play in, and it does this every time you play. The second game PlayerUnknown Productions is making will be a multiplayer shooter, which will be an exciting return to a genre Greene had colossal success in with PUBG. The game after that, game three, will introduce yet more layers and tools to the underpinning technology to get it to a point other people can use it in. And the idea is to release it for free as open source technology.

PUBG creator says he's "really heartened to see the community revolt against AI," but his studio is still using the tech in new games: "We're using it in the right way"

As the rise of generative AI continues to prove a popular talking point amid developers and gamers alike, PUBG creator Brendan Greene weighs in with his own thoughts - and it's safe to say he thinks the technology should at least not replace humans' roles in production. Greene conveys as much during a recent interview with Eurogamer while answering whether or not his studio PlayerUnknown Productions employs the use of gen AI at all to help with its work on world-generating tech. "We don't use LLMs [large language models] so I'm not super worried [about backlash]," admits the dev. "LLMs have their uses, but there were chatbots in the 60s and 70s that achieved a lot of similar things." He continues, explaining how his team's use of AI actually looks. "So I'm not super worried there. The systems we're building are to enable the artists to sculpt the worlds how they want," the PUBG mastermind describes. "It's like an orchestra: we can be either a violin player or we can be the conductor, where you know what everything does, and you just have some levers you can pull, and it creates worlds pretty quickly." As for Greene's views on gen AI and the backlash it's been met with from gamers, the dev gets it. "I've been really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff. It's good to see that gamers go: 'No - if it's not built by artists, I don't want to see it.' So that's been really great to see." He reiterates that he's "not super worried" about PlayerUnknown Productions' use of AI, as "I think we're using it in the right way." What is the right way? According to Greene, one "that enables you to create worlds quicker, rather than taking away the jobs of artists." It's certainly an interesting assertion - especially when considering Krafton, which published PUBG and remains an investor in Greene's studio still, just rebranded itself as an "AI first" company. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that PlayerUnknown Productions shares in Krafton's controversial new strategy. "As a fully independent studio, our overall goals at PlayerUnknown Productions are not influenced by Krafton's chosen strategy," as Greene states. "While Krafton remains a minority stakeholder in our studio, their internal operations are separate from ours since 2021." I suppose it makes sense - and Greene isn't alone in voicing his feelings on AI in development as an industry figure, either. Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu recently described how he's "never used AI and probably never will" himself, as it's not rewarding. Arc Raiders lead Patrick Söderlund also spoke on the matter, stating that games "can't be built by an AI" and "I hope they never can." Motoi Okamoto, Silent Hill series producer, detailed how new Konami title Silent Hill f contains "the kind of bold choices AI would never be able to make" as well. It'll be interesting to see how Greene's words apply to PlayerUnknown Productions' upcoming projects, like survival game Prologue: Go Wayback. It's set to launch in just two days on November 20, so there's not long left to wait now.