Designing for Emergence: How Prologue Unlocks Player-Driven Journeys
January 10, 2025
Happy new year to our community!
2025 is a particularly exciting year for our studio, because we are now only a few short months away from the Early Access launch of Prologue: Go Wayback! our upcoming survival game based in an ever-changing machine learning (ML) generated terrain. Which means it is high time we start telling you more about the game. In this series of dev blogs, Scott Davidson, our Creative Director, will give you all the details on how the game is designed, the vision that guides the products we make at PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, and the practical details of the tech that drives us.
What does it take to build a game where players discover their own journeys? How can gameplay systems create emergent gameplay experiences? At our studio, we are exploring these questions with Prologue. While still in development, Prologue also serves as a test bed for experimental machine learning-driven landscape generation technologies which we feel solve some of the problems of building large worlds but also presents gameplay challenges. During this early phase, our aim is to push the boundaries of emergent design while engaging players with a challenging and immersive experience.
In this blog, we’ll explore the concept of systemic emergent gameplay, highlighting how we are creating a world driven by player choices and offering insights into why we think emergence is cool.
— Scott Davidson, Creative Director
Moving Beyond Scripted Narratives
In many games today, stories are pre-written and presented to players through carefully crafted events, dialogue, and cinematics. While this approach can create amazing moments and is used in some of my favourite games, it limits the player's ability to explore and create their own stories. Humans are natural storytellers, so we are driven to guide players through our worlds and tell our stories, making sure they experience the story exactly as we have envisioned it.
However, emergent gameplay flips this approach on its head. Instead of directing the player’s experience, we design systems that allow players to create their own unique journeys. This presents a challenge for us as developers; learning to let go of the need to orchestrate the player’s experience. It forces us to shift focus to creating a world where the player’s control their destiny and interact with the world how they choose.
Grasslands bordered by dense forest.
There are plenty of games that already do this, Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, and Rust offer no singular story for the player to follow. Instead, players interact with the environment, the systems, and each other to create their own adventures.
- Broadly we are following the same philosophy in Prologue. By designing a world where every interaction matters and where your choices shape the experience. The goal is to create enough interconnected systems that players can find solutions to their problems, even ones that we never anticipated. This leads to a good balance of depth and complexity that keeps players coming back to see what else they discover. But don’t worry, we will explore story too - but only in a way that steps back from the traditional delivery and structure in an endeavour to let players to come to their own conclusions about the world.
A clearing in the woods after snow fall.
Embracing Chaos
At PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions we want to build very large worlds. However, we don’t have a huge team, and the gaming community appear jaded by the established solution of procedural generation. Its rules based and therefore can be limited. It gives results based on how much investment the team can put in and even then, it can end in you needing to add more people to elevate and polish the results. Don’t get me wrong, procedural generation has its strengths, and we use it when it suits. Machine Learning however is different, it takes large, curated datasets and it finds patterns. This produces far more varied and convincing results at scale. But, oh, if it were so simple!
- Our maps are a product of a trained ML agent who’s training set includes sample maps produced by one of our tech artist Remco and GIS data. We do not control the topology on a very small scale. We cannot dictate the locations of buildings or roads by hand, we cannot place every tree or rock and direct the player’s journey. However, we can massage the type of environment we think players would like to explore: The height of the cliffs, the path of the rivers, the size of the mountain ranges. Then start adding the things you would expect on top by analysing the terrain for the best locations and distribution. This is tricky work, but as it continues to evolve it allows more meaningful results as we challenge ourselves to add more layers.
- On Prologue -and one of our technical artist Michael talked about how our tiles system helps with this- we’ve added tiles that have bogs, some with broken and burned fields of tree’s, rock structures and discarded objects. We have lots of exciting ideas. These are layered over the general biomes of forests, grasslands and mountains. By dedicating time and love to this process we can create tiles that are incredibly unique. Tiles that might not even spawn on all maps or be so rare that when you encounter them that if you don’t take a screenshot no-one would believe you. You are on a map that is one in billions so nobody will statistically ever experience walking across it again, which we feel make’s your experience a little bit more unique.
The dimly lit starter cabin with woods visible beyond.
We want to have our artists and designers be able to focus on creating the content that gives that hand crafted feel and offset the laborious work which our developers can only do for so long before going mad. This allows them to spend most of their time and effort putting love into things that matter. Then use the technology we continue to develop shoulder much of the heavy lifting.
Balancing Systems for Player Agency
At our studio we believe video games have vast untapped potential and currently our evolution as an industry is slower than it could be. We feel emergence is one of the areas of potential which can push us forward.
At its core, emergent gameplay is about creating worlds that feel alive and solid - where the systems and environments respond to the player's actions in logical and meaningful ways. In Prologue, we are building a dynamically generated world where your survival depends on how you interact with the environment. The weather, landscape, and natural forces all play a role in shaping your experience.
Here, the game designer’s job is to create a world that is rich with possibilities. This does not mean you need to design a million systems. Often, it is about finding a few key mechanics that, when combined, create multiple opportunities for players to interact and be creative. In Prologue, we focus on just a handful of core systems. Take the example of the system that governs fire or, in simulation terms, combustion:
- In Prologue, we are trying to observe and follow how we interact in the real world when designing the mechanics. So, when starting a fire, you need tinder – for example, pieces of paper, dry grass, or cardboard. When kindling like sticks and twigs produce enough heat, they can ignite logs and large pieces of wood. Eventually we want to allow players to use other objects in the world to keep their fire burning, for example, break apart furniture and add them to the fire, if they get desperate enough, even books to keep warm. A fire's health and warmth will depend on where it is started, in a house is better than in the woods during a storm and players must keep in mind that alongside heat, smoke is also retained in unventilated structures. Combustion is a scary one. If you say ‘we want fire to behave like it does in the real world’ player expectation will be that they can start forest fires, cabin fires, plastic objects melt, clothes burn, water boils, the list goes on. Believe me we would love to do all these things eventually however every connection point between systems come at a cost of performance, time, and schedule.
The hearth can offer a safe place to start a fire and warm up.
In-game systems do not just exist independently—they interact with each other in complex and unpredictable ways. This is one of the biggest challenges for our developers. If systems are too rigid, players will feel limited in their choices, unable to creatively solve problems or explore freely. However, if systems are too chaotic, players can feel overwhelmed or lost in a world that does not seem to follow any coherent rules. Striking a balance between order and unpredictability is what makes emergent gameplay both engaging and compelling. This is a task that will continue throughout the lifespan of the game and beyond.
Design by Iteration: Learning from Bugs and Unintended Outcomes
At PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions we want to build not just large worlds but ones with depth and complexity. In the previous section we talked about our want to have systems that interact with each other realistically and consistently. This requires iteration and will inevitably create unintended design outcomes. Unexpected outcomes of a systemic approach happen often and then you must decide if you are willing to live with the results. If they enhance player choice significantly but don’t 100% meet your personal quality bar so you keep and live with some instability or cut if it creates player confusion and disengagement.
This is the challenge of emergent game design. It forces designers to think straightforwardly in terms of simulation crafting, rather than predetermining which specific experiences they want to craft. For instance, if a player in Prologue accidentally falls into a deep ravine and from which there is no way out, it might seem like a flaw in the terrain generation system. But this also presents an organic challenge to the player that they will remember afterward. We have learned to embrace these moments and ask ourselves, “Is this really broken?”
- One of the problems we have talked about in Prologue is interactivity without use. Most games fall into two categories on this subject. Some games curate their world into a small set of collectable gameplay focused items and everything else is part of the ‘set dressing’ and non interactive but possibly destructible. Some games allow a massive amount of object collection but most of those objects are junk which at the most you can sell in a shop or slightly cooler be used for their base materials. We don’t have shops, and we want our world to be alive not just feel alive. So, we make a judgement call on every object we add to the game, can the player pick this up? And if not, why not? So, you would think why bother if they have no practical use. But that's the beauty of emergence, our lack of imagination as to what players will do with these objects should not be a barrier. In fact, within a day of making this choice we realized that players could use these items to breadcrumb trails and re-trace their steps. This comes with technical challenges: If you allow every item in the game to be places anywhere the state and location of those items needs to be saved when the player quits. But we feel it’s worth the effort.
Clutter and other resources beside a cabin on a foggy day.
In the studio we regularly discuss popular developer reactions to speedruns. When players find creative ways to “break” games, they often do so by discovering new interactions between systems that the developers never anticipated. This is what we hope to learn by launching Prologue into Early Access. And rather than attempting to circumscribe player behaviour, we are leaning into it with Prologue, trusting that these unexpected moments are where the true magic of emergent gameplay happens.
Building the Future of Emergent Gameplay
For game developers, designing emergent games is both a challenge and an opportunity. It requires a shift in mindset—from controlling the player's experience to empowering them to shape their own. But the rewards are immense. When you see players talking about their experiences, discovering unexpected solutions, or interacting with your world in ways you never imagined, it is a reminder of why we love making games. With Prologue, we are launching into Early Access because this is a game that needs Early Access. It is not an almost complete game with locked down systems and an end game.
- We want to launch into Early Access with a good set of core systems as a foundation to build on. For example, we have blackberry bushes in the forests, you can pick berries and eat them. You will have to pick a lot if you plan to live just on berries as each is only 1 calorie, but you can survive. What happens if we add deer into the game. The deer are hungry too and eat the blackberries. They will run away when you get close but how many blackberries will be left? In a brief period, your relationship with these beautiful and majestic creatures may change. Then in 3 months we add a rifle and a limited supply of rounds. What will you do? The blackberry bush analogy is helpful as it illustrates the way we want to build the game with the community and have the game evolve over time.
Players can tune in to chatter on the radio as they explore.
We invite you to join us on this journey by connecting with the PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions community on Discord. Whether you are a player excited to explore Prologue or a budding game developer interested in learning more about emergent design, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.
Together, let’s explore what is possible when we step back as designers and let players come with us on this journey. We cannot wait to see the experiences you discover and in Prologue and share with us.
About the author:
Scott Davidson is Creative Director at PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions where he works mostly on Prologue: Go Wayback. Scott’s background is in Art Direction and Game Design and he has been making games since 1997, some bad; Barbie Horse Riding Adventure: Wild Horse Rescue, The Mummy Returns, some good; Puss In Boots, Nazi Zombie Army 2/3 and some very good; Epic Mickey 2 and Rust. Outside of work he enjoys drinking cups of tea, playing Marvel Snap and feeding an unhealthy obsession with geopolitics.
