Bungie’s next game, the troubled reboot of Marathon, is most easily described as an extraction shooter—currently the hottest genre on the planet due to the enormous success of Arc Raiders. But if one former Bungie developer had got his way, Marathon wouldn’t be an extraction shooter. Not because he would have made the game differently, but because he hated the term so much, he wanted to change it.
Speaking on the Shooter Monthly podcast (via TheGamePost), Bungie’s former director of product management Chris Sides said that he thought about collaborating with the studio’s marketing team to come up with a different term for extraction shooters, one that presumably would have been pushed in the runup to Marathon’s launch. The reason for this, Sides says, is the vagueness of the term.
"The problem is Helldivers 2 can be called an extraction shooter, but it’s not. The genre name is so bad. I hate the genre name of extraction shooter. When I was working on Marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like: “Can we please create a different genre name, because extraction shooter is so dumb. It’s the only genre where its name is a mechanic.”
Sides then elaborated on why he brought up Helldivers 2. "Is that an extraction shooter because you extract? No, it’s not like Tarkov at all. So, the terminology of the genre is already terrible; it really makes it hard to compare these games.
“It’s why Arena Breakout and Tarkov, you can kind of look at those because they’re both extraction shooters and they kind of fit the same mold. Comparing Arc Raiders to Tarkov just doesn’t really fit. Comparing Arc Raiders to maybe like Rust could fit, and then Rust, it’s that an extraction, because it’s survival?”
Ultimately, Sides’ issue is that “The genre doesn’t even know what it is. You, as a player, how do you know what you’re going to get?”
Personally, I’m not sure if Sides is correct when he says that extraction shooters are the only genre named after a mechanic. First-person shooters are at least partly named after their mechanics, for example, and you could make the case that stealth games are entirely named for their systems. In fact, is extraction even a mechanic in the same way that shooting or sneaking is? It basically just refers to leaving the map, after all.
However you slice it, this is why it’s generally not a good idea to get too bogged down in what does or doesn’t fit within a particular genre. Developers iterate upon existing game ideas and mechanics all the time, which is primarily how games evolve, so there’s guaranteed to be some cross-pollination between genres, whatever they happen to be called.
Frankly, I think Bungie should be less concerned about whether it’s making an extraction shooter, and more focused on whether it’s making a good one. The Destiny 2 dev has run a gauntlet of delays, controversies and layoffs since the reboot was announced, while its parent company, Sony, is unhappy with its return on investment so far.
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