We're starting to reach a point with open-world games where bigger doesn't always necessarily mean better. Take, for example, Assassin's Creed Odyssey. That's a damn good game, but I'm not sure it would have lost anything if Ubisoft had made its sprawling recreation of Greece even half the size it ended up being.
Basically, just because developers can make a huge open-world game these days doesn't mean that they should. With that in mind, join me as we take a look at Artemis; a brand new in-development game that promises an open-world roughly the same size as Earth.
Artemis is the ambitious new project from Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, the creator of PUBG. You may recall Greene announced just last week that he was leaving PUBG owner Krafton to form a new independent studio. It seems Artemis will be the developer's main focus going forward.
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Last week Greene took to Twitter to talk a little bit about Prologue, an upcoming pay-what-you-want tech demo that will explore the developer's fascination with sandbox games and the freedom they afford players. Prologue itself will be a massive open-world experience, but he's now confirmed that even this will be nothing more than a "simple" introduction to Artemis.
Speaking to VentureBeat, Greene explained that Artemis will take place in an "Earth-sized virtual world" built using machine-learning technology. It also sounds like the game will be much less reliant on repetitive side quests and waypoints, and instead aim to provide entirely unscripted emergent gameplay.
"This kind of desire to have a digital life is strong in a lot of gamers," said Greene. "Providing this space where it's a big enough world - I love Rust, but if you play on a busy server there are bases every few meters. I want a space where you don't discover a player's base for miles. Or when you do it's a big settlement rather than a box."
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Greene also teased the concept of a world that properly reacts to what players do within it. As an example, he suggested that maybe killing all the bears in a region could cause the deer population to boom. That sounds incredibly ambitious, although to be clear this is just an example Greene gave and not a feature he's promising will definitely be in the game.
"We want to give people a new place to live, because this one has some issues," Greene finished.
Featured Image Credit: PlayerUnknown
