Exoborne accomplished something very difficult: it made me enjoy an extraction shooter.
Extraction shooters are an emerging category spearheaded by developers looking for the next big thing after battle royales. Teams of players explore large open-world-like maps looking for loot, but they can potentially lose everything if an enemy or other player kills them before they can extract them. While I’ve seen the potential of this kind of shooter in games like Hunt: Showdown and Delta Force: Hawk Ops, I’ve found they feel too hardcore, taking the fun out of the run-and-gun nature of shooter that I usually resonate with the most.
That’s why I had my trepidations the first time I tried Exoborne, a third-person extraction shooter from Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodhunt developer Sharkmob and Tencent-backed Level Infinite. By leaning into unique elements like exosuit powers and a weather system, Exoborne is already one of the most approachable extraction shooters I’ve ever played.
“Let’s destroy an entire world.”
Much of the groundwork for the extraction shooter genre can be traced back to Ubisoft’s The Division from 2016. That game featured a “Dark Zone” that players could dare to venture into to find better loot at the risk of being killed by other players in what was otherwise a cooperative game. Petter Mannerfelt was The Division’s game director; he’s also one of Sharkmob’s founders and Creative Director behind Exoborne. With this new game, Mannerfelt tells Digital Trends that he wanted to embrace the extraction shooter concept fully.
“We wanted to take that one step further and really be able to explore that space and make a game that is very much an extraction shooter,” Mannerfelt tells Digital Trends. “What is so interesting for me is that you have the high stakes gameplay and long-term progression at the same time. I really like the mix of both where you can play with risk.”
Similarly, Mannerfelt says the team wanted to up the ante of the apocalyptic narrative seedlings planted by The Division: “More than ten years ago, I worked on a game where we destroyed a city, so I thought this time, let’s destroy an entire world.”
After toying around with ideas that included world-destroying asteroids, nanobots, and interdimensional portals, Sharkmob settled on an idea that would be more settled in scientific realism: cataclysmic weather caused by a megacorporation that lied about trying to solve the climate crisis and is now trying to stomp out any rebellion. Players control soldiers fighting back in exosuits that enhance their abilities.
All exosuits allow players to fling themselves across Exoborne’s open-world maps with a grappling hook and paraglider, but specific exosuits will grant exclusive abilities, like turning the player invisible. The standout feature of Exoborne is its dynamic weather. Tornados and other storms ravage the map in ways not seen in many games outside of Just Cause 4. It’s visually impressive and adds to every match’s tense, emergent feel.
That feature didn’t come easy, though, as Mannerfelt recalled the less than enthusiastic reaction he initially got from Sharkmob’s engineers when pitching this concept. “I remember the first meeting where I talked to the engineering and production leads and said what we wanted to have, and they just looked at me with blank eyes like, ‘Why would you make this?’ Well, because it’s fun!”
Approachable extraction
The core gameplay loop of Exoborne sees teams of three players venture out into open-world maps to complete pre-set objectives and eventually extract. If you find some great loot and escape with it, you get to keep it. In the cases where I was ambushed and killed by other players or got caught up in a storm like a fire tornado, I lost everything. That loop should sound fairly familiar to those who have already played games of this type; still, something clicked for me with Exoborne that hadn’t when I played other extraction shooters.
That’s because Exoborne feels much more approachable than its peers. It’s still quite difficult, though, as emergent moments caused by weather forced me to constantly rethink my strategy. Thankfully, exploration feels remarkably freeing thanks to the fluid traversal systems, and the third-person shooting doesn’t require the precision of first-person shooters like Escape from Tarkov. Sharkmob’s commitment to approachability was intentional, although Mannerfelt still believes players should have some experience with AAA shooters before checking out Exoborne.
“We didn’t want to make it that niche. Even though the general concept is quite complex, we’re trying to streamline it,” Mannerfelt says. “That was, of course, a challenge for the team. How do you make something less hardcore that is so hardcore? How can we apply structure that everyone would understand? We switched to AAA conventional shooting because that’s what more people are used to. We changed how the damage model works so it’s easier to understand. We have different tiers of weapons that make progression easier to understand, and we have applied more missions and operations to Exoborne to create more structure.”
That combination of factors harmonizes together quite nicely. While I certainly wasn’t playing at a professional level, as I could only spend a few hours with the game, I had more fun during those few hours than I have during any other time I’ve spent in more hardcore extraction shooters. That bodes well for Exoborne, which is entering a very competitive live service space.
Better than Bloodhunt
Another reason I see the potential for Exoborne to succeed is that Sharkmob has had a chance to learn from its mistakes in the live service space. Sharkmob’s last game was Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodhunt, a battle royale lauded for its game feel, which helps it attract a niche community. However, it ultimately felt too inaccessible to become mainstream. While servers are still online, Sharkmob dropped support for Bloodhunt after a year. Mannerfelt does not want to repeat the same inaccessibility mistakes with Exoborne.
“In Bloodhunt, there was a lot of fast traversal and quick pacing,” Mannerfelt says. “One of the challenges we had was that the best players were killing the new, worse players because even if I started to shoot you in the back, there were a lot of situations where you could turn around and have a chance to kill me. Since there was so much vertical, angular movement, you had an edge in that game if you were good at aiming. For Exoborne, we have slowed down the pacing quite a lot, but we still want to keep traversal, but we still want to keep the fluid traversal and a lot of verticality.”
In the live service space, teams often don’t have a chance to learn from their failures. Sharkmob is getting that chance, and I’m choosing to be optimistic about Exoborne’s viability based on what I played. The weather effects and emergent moments they create stand out in the live service space, while its third-person shooting and traversal mechanics give it a more welcoming game feel than most hardcore extraction shooters. I can’t wait to play more, and I’m looking forward to seeing where Exoborne goes once it’s in more players’ hands.
Exoborne is currently in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A playtest for it will take place between February 12 and February 17, and you can sign up for it on Steam.
