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