How Extraction Looters Could Save a Genre

You know, over the past few years, we've seen more and more games crop up that I would call sort of Tarkov-likes. Short-session PvPvE games that are all about getting in, getting some loot, and getting out. But, I think we've really just scratched the surface and what can be done with this game type. So, today, we're going to have a little fun thinking about the huge space of possibility for these types of games and hopefully answer a question that's just been plaguing me for weeks at this point. Is there a weird evolutionary offshoot of this PvPvE game type that actually becomes the future of MMOs? Thanks so much to HelloFresh for always delivering epic dinner loot drops. No RNG required. To start this whole thing off, we really have to talk about terminology. What even is the name of the genre after all? Tarkov-like, PvPvE, extraction shooter? Now, this may seem totally trivial, but it's actually quite important because it forces us to ask the question, what really is at the heart of the design of these types of games? PvPvE implies that the important part is the mixing of NPC

opponents and real people. Extraction shooter says that the get in, get out nature is what's most important. And Tarkov-like implies a whole dang internal economy. So, what's right? What's important? What's the innovation here? Well, to answer that, we're going to dive a bit back into gaming history. I'm going to argue that the progenitor of the genre was DayZ. It gave us PvPvE, permanent loss, and a war for resources that forced players into conflict. This then spawned two different genres, survival games and battle royales. Survival games took the PvPvE nature of the game and the permaloss. While PUBG, the first major battle royale game that started as a DayZ mod, really embraced the race for resources as a way to push players into conflict. And both were wildly successful. But, this split meant that survival games gave the player staggering amounts of progression to grind through, but lost all of the short session play. Whereas, battle royale games gave the player an amazing short session experience, but lost all of the long-term progression and with it risk,

which brings us right back to Tarkov. It kept the short session gameplay of the Battle Royale, but by reintroducing NBCs and the ability to grind like in a survival game, it presented a much more consumable experience. By retaining the punishing aspect of losing almost everything when you died, it now introduced risk and by letting the player choose when they wanted to escape, it creates a pretty brilliant reward curve. You could stay and get more things to be more powerful for your next run, but you also might die and lose everything. So, what are you going to do? And to me, that's really where the heart of this genre lies, you know, in the marriage of short session gameplay, grindable loot-based progression, and permadeath. So, with that all in mind, what do we call all of that? I mean, I've kind of glommed onto what James has been calling it, the loot and scoot, because, you know, nothing infantilizes a burly man doing war crimes in an abandoned city like calling it a good old loot and scoot. Of course, more mature people than us will probably come to call the genre something like an escape looter. And this is important because it captures the essentials of

the genre. And it also tells us something by all of the things that aren't in the name. There's nothing to an escape looter that says it's a shooter, that it's first person, or even that it's PVPE. You could have a Dark Souls-esque fantasy game, a top-down bullet hell, heck, you could even have a purely PVE experience where you go in with a party and then whoever doesn't make it out doesn't make it out, which dovetails us nicely back into the discussion of MMOs. Now, the hard truth is that most MMOs are in decline, at least the traditional MMORPGs are. And that makes me sad. I was a hardcore World of Warcraft player for a long time. I've been clean for many years now, but even the breakout hits of the last year have seen huge spikes and then massive drops in concurrency. Lost Ark, for instance, lost 75% of its Steam player base in the last year and New World lost a whopping 95% of its player base since launch. Honestly, with a few exceptions, I'm just not sure that the pure numbers go up gameplay married to an enormous time sink of a grind has the

appeal that it used to. However, MMORPGs did give us two things that few other games can rival to this day. A persistent multiplayer character the player was invested in and a long-term progression framework that incentivized playing with your friends. And man, escape looters are just like a hair's breadth away from providing those two things. And thus perhaps could fill the MMORPG shaped hole in my gaming heart. But in order to do that, I think a few things need to happen. First, they need just the slightest bit more meta progression. Something like creating a more generous vault for the player so that when they lose, they can routinely fall back to the second best set of gear that they managed to escape with. Or maybe it's adding something more traditional like a leveling system that gives you more health or lets you equip better things as you go. Ooh, actually, if you could get a player base big enough, it could be even as simple as unlocking deadlier maps with better loot as you progress. But more on that idea in a second. Next, I think they're going to need different theming. Games like Hunt: Showdown have shown us that the escape looters don't have to be limited

to the drab world of the modern military and they can have more different, vivid, and fantastic spaces to play in. This is actually up there on my list because I believe that imaginative worlds are both more conducive to long-term MMO style maps that you actually want to explore and allow more design space for more varied, interesting, and deadly NPCs. And finally, they need to find a way to scale more than most of the current escape looters do and not just by relying on PvP. Because while I think the PvP aspect in most of them heightens the tension and ensures that there's always a challenge even for the most geared out players, many of these games do seem to use the PvP as a bit of a crutch. Which again, is kind of fair because AI is hard and balance is also a challenge, especially when you're working with a small team. But one of the issues these games currently face is that once you are geared out, the NPCs become less relevant and thus our escape looters tend to revert to Battle Royale's just with less players in said end game playing around all of the other players still PvE-ing. And it's here

I'll circle back to that other possible fix I mentioned before, unlocking deadlier maps, getting deeper into the dungeon, or whatever you want to call it. Okay, I am really excited about this idea because I think there's a world where a PvE focused or PvE exclusive escape looter even could carve out an MMO niche. In this idea, the game is still totally online, your character is still stored on the server, and it's still recommended that you adventure with a party of other real people. But the danger lies in even more difficult NPC encounters. Now in a PvE game you probably don't want to split your player base too much by having a number of different maps to explore, and you don't want to overwhelm your players by making them fight in new locales every time. But in a PvE game you can have as many maps as you want because you just need one party to want to go to one to launch it and not wait for 20 parties to queue up so you have enough for the PvP element. And these maps could be progression gated like MMO zones, but still feature all of the time restrictions and quasi randomization of an escape looter. They'd allow for the scope and scale of traditional MMO worlds, but without the headaches of

traversal or the cumbersome bloat of hub towns. Now this isn't to say such a game wouldn't be expensive, it would be. But MMORPGs are also expensive, and between the two we're not really talking about a huge magnitude difference in cost. Plus making such a game might wrench MMORPGs into the modern world. It would enable short session gameplay, encourage repeated forays into a specific area as you race the loot scootin clock to complete your quest or find the gear you need to get a little bit farther in it, and it would encourage long-term bonds as you grow and progress with your party. Ooh, and if you really want to put the massive part back into this hypothetical MMO equation, you could still have the hundred player maps, some of them PvP, the raids, guilds, and a player driven economy all layered on top of that foundation. Sorry for rambling there. Zoey didn't give me the light and I was just really pumped to talk about all this stuff, but I hope that your brain is now bubbling over with thoughts of how a strange evolution of the escape looter might just become the next wave of MMORPG. Now, is this the only path for future MMOs? No, of course not. But

maybe, just maybe, the real future of MMOs could be the Tarkovs we made along the way. But you know, all that lootin' and scootin' really has me workin' up an appetite. Anyone else feelin' hungry? Okay, on it. Zoey, Drop the payload. Thanks, HelloFresh, right on target. As I've mentioned before, HelloFresh is a delicious meal kit delivery service that I love that frees up a ton of my time by saving me from stressful meal planning and expensive trips to the grocery store. Instead, I just get all of the ingredients I need to prepare awesome home-cooked meals delivered right to my door. I get to do a super fun activity that I love that does not involve looking at a screen for once in my life, and then I'm eating something awesome in like a half hour or less. Plus, with over 40 recipes and now more than 100 tasty add-on options available each week, that is a lot. You are sure to find something to please everyone. You want to go vegetarian or pescetarian or fit and wholesome meals? They got all those and more. And these days, since spring has sprung, that meant that my absolute favorite, the pork bulgogi bowls, were back on the menu, baby, which were super easy to make and the literal definition of a taste explosion

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believe your time and taste buds will thank you and once again so will we. Thank you so much for the support. A million big old thanks to Skyler Holmes, Kuyakoy, Joseph Blain, Dominic Valenciana, Casey Muscha, Arclight Games, Angela Valenciana, and Ahmadzia Turk for being fantastic legendary patrons.