Survival games are not known as easy; That is a kind of entire point, especially if you are often on remote, ruthless locations where you have to be fed, hydrated and protected against the elements and perhaps some hostile mobs. But prologue: go wayback! Takes his difficulty at a whole new level.
“I love brutal games,” says Pubg maker Brendan Greene. “I grew up with Doom and spent weeks trying to get past the levels. I want to make a space that is difficult and difficult, because I think many gamers are like that. Like, there is too much hand, which is fine. But my game will not have that option.”
Danger is around every corner in prologue. But unlike most survival games where there are hostile enemies that deliver the finishblow, the real risk of making the wrong choices comes. Most of my decisions in prologue led to my death early or later. Whether it tried to climb a moss -like rock for a better view of the river, just to slip away and bashed my head on the way down, or decide that I could swim over a cold river (I am free to death). These are all mistakes to learn from, but an aggressor that I never seemed best was the weather.
“Some people wanted, like a big bad or an enemy who was not predictable,” says Greene. “It is like in Battle Royale if you come across another player you can’t really control, and it’s not something you can predict. It’s the same with the weather. It is just a constant tick. So it is up to you to survive against this. And it is more that it is a constant threat, instead of something that you can easily predict.”
Although you can predict the weather a bit with the help of a handy radio that you can find in the starting cabin, this is not infallible and it takes you the majority of your backpack room. Eventually I left it behind, so I had more room for blackberries. But even with the radio in my possession, the weather was still a huge threat. Being prisoning in a sudden attack of thick fog makes navigation almost impossible, and a snowstorm will quickly turn you into a running icicle.
(Image Credit: Playerunknown Productions)
You must be incredibly methodical in your planning when crossing the PRologue cards. This is not like Minecraft or Sons of the Forest, where things only really become dicey at night – you are just as much danger during the middle of the day as you are at dusk. Hunger and thirst can touch you out of nowhere, and the descent to hunger and dehydration becomes faster than you might think. This means that you cannot just wander outside of a hut without plans or resources.
Towards the end of my time with prologue, I would use the huts that you can find across the menu, as the basis of operations where I could protect for heat, get better equipment and stock up. I only ventured outside when I was absolutely sure that I knew where I was going and that I could get there, and if there was even a hint of snow, I would leave the windows and sit down until the sun started to shine.
It’s okay to die and start again.
Brendan Greene
Talking with the rest of the team, it became clear that prologue was not even a walk in the park for them. During the early tests of tests, the developers competed among themselves to see who could first reach the end point. On average it took about an hour and a half to reach the final destination, and that is with tons of planning and a bit of luck.
“We had T-shirts for the winners who read:” I came to the weather station, and everything I received was this bad T-shirt, “says Greene. “I think five people got them internally. There was also an audio engineer who could not get there – he came so close several times that it became a meme internally. But then he finally got it – there was a lot of celebration.”
(Image Credit: Playerunknown Productions)
But even with all the preparation in the world, things may not come true. “It’s okay to die and start again,” Greene recalled me. After all, prologue is like a survival Roguelike. You get one chance to survive the heavy weather and find an external weather station within a map of 8×8 km. If you reach your destination, then the game is over and you can give it a new card, but the same happens when you die.
“I expect that many people will hate it,” says Greene. “But that’s ok if it evokes a reaction – that’s all I want. People didn’t get (Battle Royale) at first, but then they did that. And I think it’s the same with this, the goal here creates these big, mass worlds for everyone. We already have a demo, it’s not as good as it is.
“Prologue is not the next great game for me. It is like the second album from Muse, something weird, something that is a bit different, but it serves a purpose of experiments and achieving larger places.”