Ryan McCaffrey
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With the blurb “Gear up, get in, and get out”, Exoborne elegantly sets out its stall as an extraction shooter. But they left out the most important part: “Get blown around by a massive tornado”. While Exoborne bears all the features you’d expect from the likes of Escape from Tarkov and Call of Duty: Warzone’s DMZ, the most exciting part of a presentation I saw at Play Days was when developer Sharkmob talked about the weather.
Exoborne’s setting is not postapocalyptic, but rather midapocalyptic, with the world falling apart all around you – the result of mankind’s meddling with the climate. Project Rebirth’s attempts to provide limitless clean energy have backfired somewhat, and now Mother Nature is taking her revenge.
Extraction shooters live or die on emergent gameplay, and there’s nothing as emergent as a twister, flood or tsunami. The weather during a session of Exoborne can change from clement to hellscape in minutes – all of which has profound effects on gameplay, according to Sharkmob.
A 10-minute walkthrough video based on a pre-Alpha build of the game began with a short cutscene where a group of teammates known as The Reborn assemble in a dropship and prepare to jump. The character models are based on whatever skins and loadouts each player has selected, so this is a nice chance to show off your flair before the action starts.
The players then skydived from the dropship, parachuting in to the map below. Action kicked off immediately, as this area of Colton County in the Southeast USA was infested with killer robotic machines and human enemies.
Kill, loot, equip – so far, so extraction shooter. Entering a base located nearby required some teamwork, and the destruction of some AT-ST-like enemy walkers, while at another point the squad clambered aboard a Warthog-style armored vehicle with open top/sides/back for ease of blasting. Maps are as vertical as they are wide, with towers connected by huge Rebirth Cables that snake through the environment, placed by the architects at Rebirth without regard for the scenery or the human residents; these industrial eyesores allow players to ascend with grappling hooks and fight on higher ground. Burned-out school buses and a busted motel sign litter the deserted streets of what might long ago have been an idyllic rural town. Sinkholes offer the chance to explore underground.
And then came the tornado warning. Once the weather hit, the squad cut their mission short, calling in the dropship and climbing aboard with the loot before things got hairy. But a Sharkmob developer explained that over a longer play session, you can expect a dynamic range of climates to impede your progress. The rain apparently gets so heavy you can no longer hear your teammates, their comms drowned out by the deluge, forcing players to rethink their strategies.
While the risk may be high in any given session, Sharkmob has designed Exoborne to be more forgiving in the longer term. That is, extraction is not always guaranteed, and you may lose items in a given session if you don’t make it out alive – but the game makes it possible to rebuild your arsenal over future games, improving your character from game to game as you loot and progress. The idea is to make the game as approachable as possible for newcomers, who may find the high risk of other extraction shooters off-putting.
Throw in a bunch of cool near-future weapons, tech gear and Exo-Rigs, and of course a mix of PVP and PVE scavenging action, and Exoborne is shaping up to be a cool addition to the genre.