Exoborne is making the extraction shooter less punishing, and taking storytelling notes from Hades

If there’s anyone that can speak authoritatively about the extraction shooter as a genre, it’s Petter Mannerfelt. He's currently creative director on Sharkmob’s high-stakes PvPvE shooter Exoborne, but not too long ago he was a game director at Ubisoft Massive, where he worked on The Division and (most notably) its Dark Zone mode.

Before Escape From Tarkov codified the term 'extraction shooter’, players were backstabbing each other for high-tier loot and extracting from The Division's Dark Zone, a quarantined high-risk arena embedded in the RPG's New York map. The concept is now one of the most chased-after trends since Battle Royale.

Battle Royale is actually where Sharkmob started. The studio's first game—Vampire: The Masquerade - Blood Hunt—was a casual, high-mobility battle royale that couldn't maintain an audience despite its quality. Petter attributes some of the game’s struggles to being late to the party, long after Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone gobbled up all the attention, and as other studios were already looking for what's next.

With Exoborne, Petter says the studio has both matured and is better positioned this time, as the extraction shooter is still a relatively young and malleable concept. While Escape From Tarkov has put forward a popular and extremely tense template for the genre, Exoborne is taking a somewhat softer, more mass-market approach.

During a Q&A after my preview session of Exoborne, Petter explained a few of the things Exoborne is doing differently to get players in and having fun, starting with how it introduces players to the world with a narrative. After a front-loaded intro and tutorial, Exoborne will slowly drip-feed lore, cutscenes and optional story quests.

He likened it to Supergiant's Hades and how it famously made action roguelikes more approachable through its slowly-expanding narrative over dozens of runs. Players will have their own personal story progress in Exoborne, but this will happen in parallel with the regular PvPvE combat. Each map will also have hidden tidbits of lore, audio logs, hidden footage and the like—similar to how The Division scattered story content through its dilapidated city streets.

Exoborne's story will continue well beyond what the game launches with. During my tour of Sharkmob in Malmo, Sweden, I got a look at their motion capture and photogrammetry studio—an impressive ensemble of cameras that allows the studio to scan in real actors (and items manufactured by their in-house propmaster) and have them play out cutscenes in real-time, complete with a hand-held camera rig and facial capture. If all works according to plan, the studio feels confident they’ll be able to react to the demands of their audience and produce cut-scenes and other narrative content fast enough to match audience demand in the cutthroat live-service space.

But that’s for later. More important is not scaring off newcomers that might have watched a few Tarkov streams and decided that extraction shooters are too stressful to bother. Sharkmob wants to ease in players who are only familiar with the hardcore side of the genre.

Exoborne’s matches tend to be short and eventful, dropping players into the map with an assortment of optional PvE objectives to complete and the option to bug out via marked extraction zones whenever you’ve had your fill. Players will be able to stockpile money and crafting resources which you can use to buy baseline equipment, and there’ll be no server wipes. To further reduce frustration there’s also plans for some kind of skill or progression-based matchmaking, although what exact form this will take is yet to be announced.

There’s no release date for Exoborne yet, but beta sign-ups will be open during Gamescom this month. The full game will be a premium release, and Petter was keen to clarify that, while there will be the usual assortment of live-service cosmetics available, Exoborne isn't pay-to-win. The only way to get better gear is to go out there and find it… or kill someone else and take theirs.