PUBG creator on how his Earth-sized open world differs from Light No Fire: "I'm not making a game. I'm building a world"

PUBG creator Brendan Green’s long-term goal is Project Artemis, an “Earth-scale” open-world sandbox. If you’re a fan of No Man’s Sky, that might sound a bit familiar. After all, its developer, Hello Games, is currently working on Light No Fire, an open-world sandbox game that’s said to give players an area to explore that’s “about the size of Earth.”

Despite those similarities, however, Greene says that his project – which could still be as much as a decade away – differs from Hello Games’ efforts thanks to the technology behind it. When I asked him how he felt about the follow-up to No Man’s Sky, he explained that “Light No Fire’s procedural.” That’s as opposed to the machine-learning technology that’s shaping Project Artemis, but it also comes down to Greene’s design philosophy.

“I don’t know their tech stack,” he explains, “so I’m not super familiar with the way they generate stuff, but I don’t think it’s the same goal at the end, which is providing an open-source holodeck. And that’s the difference. I think most people are making games. I’m not making a game, I’m building a world.”

That world will play host to “games and experiences within that world that take place in the world,” but its the creators of those experiences that are important to Greene. “I don’t want to make games for people, I want to make games with people.” It’s that kind of emergent, user-generated content that he says will shape his game – “if you give the player or the community the means to generate their own experiences, they’ll go ham.”

Of course, there’s also the nature of the two games. Hello Games has already revealed the fantastical side of Light no Fire, while Greene and his team is aiming for a much more “realistic” game.

For now, the difference between the two projects is somewhat moot. Light No Fire currently has no release date, though it’s likely to launch before Project Artemis. Greene says that could still be more than a decade away, and while Hello Games hasn’t offered a launch window for its game, it does seem to be a bit further along than that.

“If we can do it… This will be something groundbreaking”: PUBG creator Brendan Greene is five years into making a 10,000km “realistic Minecraft” – but there’s still a decade to go.

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