two really good artstation pages from the franchise art director and senior world artist respectively. really psyched with the familiar faces i recognize
https://www.artstation.com/josephacross
https://www.artstation.com/ninehydras
more concepts posted on twitter
I’ve never played an extraction shooter either. Am I on the right track here: it’s kind of like Metroid Fusion except the terrifying Samus clone that you randomly bump into is other players?
I think it’s more like fortnite only slightly slower
Core components are a big map with PvE objectives, small teams. Multiple player teams start a map together. Players start naked and have to loot from the environment to gear up, but their goal is to escape. Escaping allows a player to keep their equipment: like a roguelike, players are expected to climb and fall the progression structure again and again. Hitting max gear can usually be done in a couple games, but should be somewhat longer than a battle royale.
“Extraction shooter” as in, get in, get loot, extract out.
The game needs to create some form of pressure to incite player conflict. Generally, this means: map exfiltrations are limited like musical chairs, and take long enough to create a fight; the map shrinks in size as it counts down, top-end gear or progression goals are visible to all players as map targets.
How many goals players have outside of conflict is up to the game but they’ve been trending towards more elaborate goals that don’t conflict with other players, for example, MMO-style mission objectives that involve moving to specific destinations, triggering certain fights. The purer games hold off on the extra goals and high-level play moves towards PvP action.
One of the nice things about this structure is that new and low-skilled players have plenty of goals they can succeed in even if they can’t take on high-skill players. Strong skill-sorted matchmaking isn’t all that important because the PvE side should be challenging enough – in fact, these games can be more flexible with player counts because matches that end without encountering a player still hold the essential PvE loop.
On the downside, the extended gearing up next to battle royale games makes intentional PvP play slow and grinding. Losing a match and resetting a player’s goal to “gear up” and then “PvP” takes much longer. It’s best if the game can find activities for elder players that aren’t just picking off weak players. Escape from Tarkov, one of the first to distill this structure down from DayZ, builds off the Arma heritage and so has incredibly fast and brutal time-to-kill. Combined with its sparse goal structure, it has become much more unforgiving for new players and far fewer players convert from low-skill scavenger play to high-skill hunting play.
I’m sorry, maybe I was unclear before, but: yes, I would like Bungie to try to make a game that I might theoretically like, instead of making a game that I will certainly hate. Yes. I would like to see them try.
This argument that “Bungie sucks too bad to make a good game, but I trust them to do a good job making a shitty game instead” isn’t too persuasive, to me.
A company like Bungie literally can’t make what you want, that’s what exactly what I mean.
Part of the game of planning out any commercial game project is trying to guess the addressable market and be able to say, with some confidence, that the size of the team and the amount of money you’re going to spend will fit in that. At Bungie’s scale, they’re playing under extreme constraints; they’re spending millions of dollars every month to keep the doors open. Every project inherits a list of things it can’t do because it would be too niche or too offputting. The only outcome is safe mediocrity.
Now clearly that isn’t entirely determined. Strong, shared vision is essential to make something new and good and it exists, but it fights against every single thing they’ve learned in order to survive at this scale and time. Risk-mitigation is another way of saying “lessons learned”. Bungie has been working at where it can hold vision and where it has to follow for 25 years and they’ve survived only because they’ve prioritized finding where players will be over holding to a specific type of game. The Bungie that wanted to do close weird single-player campaigns a) never existed, because that was a secondary value to their main goal of “making a popular game”, and b) died by never doing Halo, and because they weren’t willing to push Halo as a multiplayer game first and foremost.
Once a studio gets on the train to growth they don’t get off it without blowing everything up. People instead take escape pods and found new studios and vow to “keep everything human scale”. They’re leaving because the studio fundamentally cannot make certain types of games and can’t work in certain ways any more. Changing scale is the only way to solve that problem.
hey weren’t we just bemoaning what happened to Helldivers? I can tell you exactly why that game is like it is: they had some hits and decided to scale up, realized at their cost level no game in their “silly co-op” genre was even a third as popular as they needed to support their new production costs, convinced themselves that the core of their studio identity was just “co-op”, relegating the ‘silly’ to the free land of aesthetics (writing is cheap), and shifted their play style to one where mid-size hits could plausibly cover costs.
The mistake was getting bigger. Changing the game, losing their core values? By then it was already decided.
modern warfare 2 has a tarkov mode which I’ve been playing and what I do is I go to the escape point closest to the Weapons Case and sit perfectly still hiding in a bush or on a roof for 15 minutes (time limit before the last chopper leaves) waiting for someone to heist the Case, so I can rob them right before they escape. though it’s better if someone else robs them first and I rob the robber, they’re always more off guard. If I get 7 cases out I get a new skin. you all could of been there experiencing that thrill with me and learning the secret knowledge that bungie and your hero miyazaki and everybody else are already onto. you don’t want to be swept away by the tides of time do you, increasingly lost in an strange world you feel more disconnected from everyday? remember the lithuanian proverb “the train does not wait for the shitting ones”
intrigued but bungie were way too into nerfing anything fun in the name of “balance” even in their lifestyle game with no comp or esports scene
That art style is badass.
Oh, right.
^ Versions of the three available for PC, Mac, and Linux running in some modern brew engine thing.
Phew, that level design. = P
Got lost in the first level in the first two games. I mean, not lost lost but just not knowing where else to go stuck kind of thing. I seem to be really bad at spotting the various things that serve as switches. Kinda not lost but just sorta lost and then owned by floaty guys with tracking fireballs in the first level of the third game. Once one of them blasted his own dude in the back though, that was the best part.
All I knew of Marathon prior to this was people missiling each other in multiplayer over the college network from the little computer lab in my ol’ dorm. Oh hm I graduated in '96 so it couldn’t have been Infinity. There were really narrow twisty hallways with tiny stairs like in the first stage of that one, but I guess those were multiplayer maps from the first game; I only ever heard it referred to as “Marathon.”
It’s a very odd experience to post “large, well-funded videogame corporations won’t make the kinds of games I care about any more” and for you to steeple your fingers and reply “ah, well, you see, large, well-funded videogame corporations won’t make the kinds of games you care about any more because the crappy games make more money” as though I didn’t already understand that this was the reason.
Ok, you got me. If, in Nu Marathon, you have to roll a fistful of d6s every time you want to do something, I’ll take back everything I’ve said
wait what i didn’t know anyone else even played this game let alone had a piece in them about it
i’ve played DMZ a bit, extraction shooter stuff is “fine” i guess. tarkov is incredibly hostile to new/casual players, so there’s a niche for, idk, a ubisoft (r6: extraction) or a bungie (this marathon thing) to make one of these that regular people won’t bounce off quite as violently, but
thinking about this game just makes me depressed lol
His assertion isn’t that they won’t but that they can’t and it’s smart of them to not. Which is probably true.
eh, don’t worry, he knows how hard he can slug me
hey we should play one of these games sometime Cuba. There’s more than enough to like and complain about in Modern Warfare 2’s DMZ. You should see how they do gun handling these days, they’ve got a better handle on why making short-barrels vs long-barrels different, LMGs work in their proper role but for very gamey reasons? It’s really impressive how they’re using the same balance between the fast short game of deathmatch and these enormous maps with wide engagement distances.
in retrospect it’s weird that respawn didn’t use the extraction concept from titanfall match epilogues (losers get to ship with no respawns) in apex
bungie handling is in its own world now and their ttk is almost always the highest among peers so it’ll be a very different sandbox
Have they ever hinted at doing any mech play in Apex? Kind of hard to do such a big reward in a competitive game, but depending on how big a target it makes you…
