The humble extraction shooter can be quite the tough project to create, let alone improve upon. In themultiplayerlandscape, these titles have been few and far between with not too much variety to them. Thankfully,after getting my hands on the upcomingExoborne, developed by Sharkmob, I can safely say those looking for a great experience are in luck.
Thegame, revealed at The Game Awards 2023, is a tactical third-person multiplayer extraction shooter set in a post-apocalyptic United States. As a Reborn, you and up to two other teammates will explore the desolate Colton County and find resources to bring back to base. Soldier NPCs, other players and several forces of nature, however, will come your way. With your Exo-rigs, powerful mech suits with varying abilites and weapons, each extraction is promised to be a thrilling and intense experience. While at the event in Las Vegas,we had the chance to chat with the title’s executive producer, Brynley Gibson, to talk about the title, his involvement and how it has and will change, especially after the incoming playtests in February.
The highly-anticipated Exoborne has set the next batch of playtests for mid-February.
A Fresh New Division
[Hardcore Gamer] As a producer, what made you drawn toExoborne?
[Brynley Gibson - Executive Producer ofExoborne] There’s a number of different things because there’s quite a lot going on in the game. I think our setting is kind of interesting and obviously pressing in the world, even though this is a work of fiction and set in the future. It’s really kind of an interesting thing to play around with. As creatives, your next game should be something you haven’t quite done before. And so building these systems around the forces of nature and the hazards that we have and that interplay with the Exo-rigs and what they can do, how it all works together, has always been exciting. Another thing was I’ve done shooters, I’ve made open world games before, and they involved extraction, but not like this. I think it’s exciting and really interesting, but it’s quite niche.
What we’re trying to do is try and open it up a bit, smooth off some of those rougher edges and bring more people. I don’t think there’s an extraction shooter that’s broken through to mass appeal. That’s not to say this is a casual game, it’s a hardcore game, but the way we do shooting, the way we do health, how we map the controls, it’s all kind of AAA shooter conventions, not a MilSim [military simulator i.eARMA,Insurgency: Sandstorm], and that’s an exciting thing as well.
A lot of the team comes fromThe Division, which is also a very extraction heavy shooter. How was that with in terms of how it helped withExoborne’s development?
The founders (Petter Mannerfelt, Rodrigo Cortes, and Martin Hultberg) have worked together for, like, fifteen years so it’s quite interesting to join a team where so many people have worked together for so long. It’s also quite cool because there’s a level of trust with those people. They know their strengths and weaknesses and there’s definitely learnings from the past from their game. That’s true of any games you’ve worked on. You’re kind of like “Yeah well, we did that, this is what happened with our game and so on.” There’s certain things that you get from that. I do think, as a heritage, realistic games, taking the known, like a city in that game, here we kind of got an area of the country, this of America, and then changing it. Like, confounding the players' expectations. I think that’s always interesting where you’re like, “This is recognizable, I see this, I see this, but then these elements are strange to me.” That combination makes it a really exciting place to play in.
I know you talked a little bit about how you’re directing it towards a hardcore thing instead of a casual one. Is that the type of audience that you’re looking for withExoborne?
Yeah, this is not a casual game. It is a hardcore game for hardcore players. The MilSim, likeTarkov[Escape from Tarkov] is incredibly hardcore. People love the idea of the extraction shooter more than the actual reality of some of the ones when they play them. It’s too rough. Losing everything, resetting back to zero. People are like, “I’ve invested all this time.” So, by adding narrative and the structure of missions, a story that you can journey through and other systems that, even if you wipe, you’re getting bonuses and you’re progressing. So your long-term progression is always moving forward. That’s how we open it up. It’s still absolutely a hardcore game, but it’s for the wider shooter audience is how we should think about it. The other thing is I have friends who are Tarkov players. The thing aboutExoborneis that they can see it as a game that they can play when they can’t playTarkov; they can then play this with their other friends, who may not be quite on their level.
It’s still absolutely a hardcore game, but it’s for the wider shooter audience is how we should think about it.
You talked about the comparisons between different games likeTarkov. What do you think aboutExobornethat you feel, if it’s implemented into future games, do you want to see go into the different extraction shooters that are coming up?
Oh, wow. That’s an interesting one. That’s interesting because I think lots of these games are changing and evolving all the time. I might say something and you’ll be like, “yeah, that’s already in that game,” [laughs] because as developers, we look at things and we try and evolve them. Sometimes, people end up in the same place completely separately. We’re like, “oh, we’ve done this thing” and people go “they’ve done that as well.” and we think “oh, no!” [laughs]. So, one of the things I really like, and this is where you’re able to say, “actually, this is in that game,” [laughs] is that we used to have a very free session, very open-ended. You could essentially play for hours in the map. We had many ways you could extract loot from the game without actually leaving. But, we actually found that we got the risk/reward thing wrong. That was a version of the game from a while back. That’s where we tightened up the risk and we made it so you lose everything in your loadout when you die and there’s only one way to extract. So we kept that hard, so the session risk is high, but the long-term risk is lower. That’s the kind of thinking.
It was still a bit open-ended on when you should extract and we wanted to drive players to want to extract and so we have this thing called the Rebirth Trace. It’s a counter, currently set at twenty minutes in my change through playtesting. The idea is Rebirth Corporation is sort of looking for you, and eventually, when the counter runs out, they’ve got you, they’ve tracked you and the best way to take you out is to tell everyone else where you are. Then all the other players on the map can see where you are. So you may stay, but now you’re a higher risk level. Now, there is then a second timer that is the Kill Switch, and if you don’t leave by that timer, [makes explosion noise] you’re gone. So that’s quite a fun way of driving people through the session, but also ramping up the risk of people staying in there for longer.
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Charging Into New Territory
You mentioned something about changing over time. You did have a beta last year on PC. From that beta, you told us the team did an overhaul of the loadout system. Were there any other big features that changed since the beta?
That [the loadout system] was definitely the biggest one because when we talk about looting it’s not just the infantry system, it’s not just the backpack bit, it’s also what weapons and abilities you have and how that works and so we switch to the slot system. It affects weapon modding, ability mod and reflection. So it echoes into lots of different systems. I think a smaller one, which was really cool, is some of the abilities that all the Exos have now, as they’re kind of core, that you’re able to’t change. They’re all set. It used to be everything was moddable, so there was nothing preset. Obviously, we have this broken world with lots of verticality and the Grappling Hook was something that was just an ability you had to add. And people were like, “why would I ever insert into the world without this piece of kit? It’s so fun to play! Why are you taking away my fun?” So we decided that you should just have it always then [laughs].
From that conversation, we then talked about having no fall damage. Although we have our glider, we have this world where you could easily fall off the edge. That would just be frustrating to players. You’re supposed to be a powerful super person so hey, how about there’s no fall damage? Then, that leads to really cool things where people go up, use a strong wind, they use their glider, get above people and then just drop out of the sky.
I’m guilty of overusing that grappling hook and dropping down on an enemy camp when I played [laughs]. So you did talk a bit about your past. How doesExobornediffer and contrast from what you’ve done before?
I’ve been making games for over 21 years. I’ve made loads of different things. I’ve made rhythm action games, singing games. I did a series for Nintendo calledArt Academy, where you learn to paint and draw. I was a series producer on that. I’ve made many different things over time. As a developer, for me, I like new challenges andExoborneis a big team as a producer. That’s part of my job, is we run the project so it’s a big development and that’s exciting in its own right. I’ve done games with extraction, I’ve done open world and I’ve done shooting before, but I would say maybe this is the most hardcore game I’ve done as well, so that’s kind of exciting.
Brynley has been a producer for games likeThe Movies,PlayStation VR Worlds,Battalion Wars 2, and the aforementioned Art Academy series.
You have an upcoming playtest in February that was recently announced. After that, what are the next stages forExobornecoming up to its release this year?
So we’re not being specific when. We want the game to be just right. I’m making a cake. It’s got to be just right until it’s time to come out of the oven. By playing not just with a few hundred players, but with tens of thousands of players, you can really learn a lot about the game; the economy, the balance of it, onboarding tutorial. These [are the] kind of hygiene factors that are so important to get right, like how you introduce people to systems, but also our tech side of things. We’re talking a lot about the creative and the player experience but actually, our back end is hugely important. Games do go out there and they haven’t tested those things as thoroughly and it’s super frustrating to players to play when the game is too popular. You need to make sure all of these different elements work and I think these kind of tests are the things that help us do both the creative but also the technical side of things, so that when we do release the game into people’s hands, they have a super smooth experience.
One last question for you, Mr. Gibson. What’s your go-to strategy for when you playExoborne?
I have to control my instincts when I play this game because I like charging in so I often play the Kodiak Exo-rig because you’re able to tank it up. It’s got the Fortress passive ability, that when you start running, you get a bit of field around you and can absorb a bit of power there. But in this game, charging in gets you killed [laughs]. This is my tip: although the movement and combat is fast and free-flowing, when you’re not doing those things, in the in-betweens, you need to be cautious. Take your time, and when you do decide to attack, you make it happen. So that’s the key: caution. Yeah, I’ve died quite a lot. Terrible decision [laughs].
Exoborne will release on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S sometime in 2025. Signups for the upcoming playtests are available on thegame’s Steam page, with the tests occuring from February 12-17 More information can be found onExoborne’s official website.
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