Prologue: Go Wayback, the upcoming survival game from PUBG creator Brendan Greene’s new studio, wants to challenge survival genre tropes – mostly by demoting the importance of hunger/thirst meters and not relying on endless tree-felling.
Speaking to the Epic Games Store, Scott Davidson – former Rust developer and now creative director on Prologue – explained that his team is reversing course on a survival game staple. Any fan of the genre will have lost a life to hunger or thirst somewhere along the way, but developer PlayerUnknown Productions wants to make that a (slightly) more rare occurence.
“We want to prioritise temperature as a metric,” Davidson explains, meaning that it’s the cold, rather than hunger or thirst, that’s likely to kill you first. “You very rarely die of dehydration in survival circumstances. You very rarely die of malnutrition, because it takes days and days for you to burn through all the calories you’ve got left.”
In my various Prologue playthroughs during a preview event earlier this year, I only died of hunger once, but the elements claimed my life multiple times over – there’s definitely something to the team’s desire to make the hardest possible survival game.
Hunger and thirst will play a part – Davidson says that as they drop, you’ll lose the ability to regulate temperature, so you’ll then get colder, faster. Those meters aren’t the only survival genre staple that the team is getting rid of, however.
Just like you’ll have died from hunger or thirst somewhere on your survival journey, you’ll also probably have punched down a tree – or at least bludgeoned it into submission with a stone axe – for crafting materials.
That’s not something Prologue is leaning into – while Greene likes the idea, Davidson says that he doesn’t think it fits with the game’s otherwise realistic tone: “Have you tired chopping down a tree? It’s really, really hard.”
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