When is the Prologue release date? If you’re a fan of PUBG Battlegrounds and you’ve been keeping an eye on PlayerUnknown himself, then chances are you’re desperate to find out what Brendan Greene is up to. Well, you’re not alone, and we’ve got the latest updates on Prologue and Project Artemis.
After our exclusive Prologue preview, it’s clear that Greene has left his battle royale game roots behind him to create the foundations for new and innovative open-world games. At its core, Prologue offers a huge open world you can explore at your own pace. But what it means is much, much more – especially if his team can pull it off. Here’s everything you need to know.
Prologue release date window
The Prologue release date is in Q2 2025. This was confirmed by PlayerUnknown Productions in an official trailer and press release.
Prologue is “coming soon to early access” on Steam, and will remain in early access for around one year. According to the official store page, the full version of Prologue will be a “far deeper experience,” offering a larger world, enhanced simulations, and lore. There will also be no price increase after the full launch.
Prologue is a precursor to Project Artemis, which Jamie describes as “a metaverse full of life-size, browsable planets with terrain built by machine learning, hosting user-generated monetizable content” ahead of his Prologue interview with Brendan Greene. Prologue is a “testbed” for that technology, which Greene established is a “five to ten year journey.”
However, Prologue is not the earliest opportunity to experience Project Artemis. The Preface tech demo gave us a glimpse at the early iteration of PlayerUnknown’s Melba engine. While it’s not a fully realized videogame in the same way as Prologue promises to be, it’s certainly a good way to gauge the potential of the final product. Greene describes it as a “simple experiment” on a massive scale.
Prologue trailers
The Prologue teaser trailer debuted at The Game Awards in 2019. It establishes the forest biome and its weather effects, with the suggestion of wild dogs through ambient sound. It doesn’t offer us much, but it does fit with the description Greene gave of the game: a single-player adventure that requires players to survive long enough in the wilderness and find a route to the nearest airfield.
Following the development diary update in December, PlayerUnknown Productions released a gameplay trailer that established Prologue’s full title. The “Prologue: Go Wayback!” trailer established the environmental scope of the project with overhead shots of the forest biome alongside a boots-on-the-ground perspective during day and night, as the player battles through snow, wind, and rain with only a compass for a sense of direction.
It also exemplified some of the survival elements in Prologue, including building a shelter, cooking food, and donning clothes for warmth. There was also a brief tease of character customization; the player character’s skin tone and voice changes throughout the trailer as they scrabble along challenging terrain. We even get to don a pair of lightweight headphones, though it remains to be seen if we can port our own music into Prologue’s world.
This brief trailer was followed by the more substantial Prologue: Go Wayback! playthrough trailer, which offers a quick run-through of the moment-to-moment gameplay. We see the survival aspects at the forefront of the experience, as the player relies on a flashlight, an ordnance survey map on a clipboard, and the aforementioned compass to navigate to their base. Inside, they retrieve supplies like practical hiking clothes, tinned beans, and binoculars before they strike out into the wilderness.
Prologue news
Prologue still remains shrouded in mystery, though details are beginning to trickle out as we head towards the release date. We know it’s part of Project Artemis, an incredibly ambitious project, and we know that the game’s main aim is to survive the wilderness. But what other bits of information can we glean from the internet and the few interviews Greene has done?
Firstly, we know the world will be 64x64km and have a realistic weather system. The map will be generated with every new game, and you’ll be given a location to find and some tools to survive. Secondly, PlayerUnknown confessed that the game might be a bit “boring” in an interview with GamesBeat. He admits that lighting fires, boarding up windows, and keeping warm isn’t for everyone and that Prologue is being created as a testbed for something much bigger.
This desire to create a gigantic world has come from playing games like DayZ, where the edges of the map often limited his gameplay. He wants to create a world in which vehicles impact the game, and finding another player’s base takes time rather than seconds. In short, he wants to create something where your actions have consequences, and Prologue will enable that.
We also know that the studio isn’t reliant on the commercial success of Prologue. In the same interview, Greene notes that the team already has funding for Artemis, so they have a “chance to show off and bring people into the fold a lot earlier.”
The radio silence from PlayerUnknown Productions following the release of the Prologue teaser was finally broken at the tail end of 2024 with a dev diary. Greene explains that the studio has been “getting [Prologue] into a place that we can start sharing with the broader public” in the three years since its initial announcement.
He goes on to talk about Prologue’s “simple survival loop: get from one side of the map to the other side of the map with some difficult weather along the way.” However, the team is quick to clarify that Prologue is not intended to be a difficult experience. Instead, its challenge lies in the repercussions of terrain changes, from slippery rocks to arduous snowbanks.
As we settle in for the Prologue release date, we’ve got a collection of the best survival games before you tackle its windswept forests and thunderous plains. Alternatively, you could create your own adventure in one of the best sandbox games, or look ahead to some more highly anticipated upcoming PC games coming this year.
