There are two Brendan Greene’s (or PlayerUnknown’s, however you prefer to refer to the game dev). There is the Brendan Greene who wants to listen to the feedback offered up by those partaking in the early access period of his current game, Prologue: Go Wayback. And there is the Brendan Greene who doesn’t, for quite reasonable reasons. Both of these are still him, and both show up in a recent interview.
First, the Greene who wants to listen to feedback. The developer recently spoke with PC Gamer about Prologue, which is out in early access with a name that Edwin seems to dislike as much as me, where he explained his intention for going with an early access release strategy. “I want to build games with the community, rather than for them, because that’s how I got into gaming; I came from modding,” Greene explained, pointing to examples like how a free run mode and free roam mode were added in thanks to player feedback. He notes that the thing they’re trying to do is “to use early access in the way it was meant to be.”
It’s an admirable approach, even if community feedback shouldn’t always be listened to because sometimes you need to draw a hard line. And draw such a line Green has, as in the same interview with PC Gamer, he explained that the number two requested feature in the survival game is adding animals.
“But, if we add animals, that would mean you need something to defend from animals,” Greene explains. “While we can technically add animals, as we figured out pathfinding stuff for the world, it’s a lot of resources to program good AI for animals. You want them to feel real, especially in the world we’re building.”
He continues to note that getting there while being happy with the results would require a lot of resources, but he’d rather focus on “building a more complete world, with paths, power lines, and even bigger points of interest that are not just cabins. That’s where I want to focus the team, rather than adding more things for you to worry about. I think the weather is sufficiently worrying at this stage.”
As mentioned above, I do not think listening to community feedback is something that should be treated as gospel just because a large number of people want something. You have to stand firm sometimes! Adding animals does sound like it would fundamentally change the thing that Prologue is, and besides, there’s surely a similar enough survival game out there that lets you be hunted by a wolf or something, no? Anyway, forget about all that hogwash I just said, Brendan, if you’re reading this change the game’s name it really is an odd one.
