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I have something to confess to you, dear reader: I’m not an extraction shooter guy. I wasn’t a battle royale guy, either. If I’m playing any sort of PvP game, I don’t find it fun to slink around in the shadows for 10 minutes only to have a heart attack when I’m finally confronted by some dude with more patience and a better handle on their crosshair than me.
So believe me when I say I share Ultrakill publisher New Blood’s co-founder Dave Oshry’s frustration on the Quad Damage Podcast (thanks, GamesRadar+) when he jokes, in an exasperated fashion: “You’ve seen the posts, like, Miyazaki’s been playing Tarkov—Tarkov’s done irreparable f*cking damage to the game industry.”
Oshry is speaking on both Nightreign and the Switch 2-exclusive Duskbloods—the first of which is a PvE battle royale-style co-op game, while the other appears to be shaping up to be some sort of weird extraction shooter… thing. Both titles are clearly the studio handing smaller projects to budding devs and experimenting with its vast success, but still.
Oshry gets in a good-natured huff about it: “Everything needs to be a f*cking extraction shooter—and like, it’s cool, but it’s just like… I just like regular-ass games. But I’m old. I get it, I’m not the target audience for these games anymore.”
Honestly Oshry, I understand you, I really do. Call it a skill issue on my part—and there’s some truth to that—but I can’t stand the short windows of action in your average BR or extraction shooter game. I like to chew on a challenge: I’ve played most of the Souls games, and against the health of my thumbs I’ve gotten back into Guilty Gear: Strive recently.
But when I’m trying to get better at a game, I like to iterate, y’know? I’m a kinesthetic learner. I’ve gotta get my butt handed to me a handful of times so I can figure out what has and hasn’t gone wrong. In any game where you have to spend a lot of time being very vigilant in very quiet environments, my understimulated brain meat vanishes into nothingness and starts thinking about Pathfinder 2e or something.
I’d be very surprised if FromSoftware is doing a full pivot to this kind of thing, though—rather, games like Duskbloods and Nightreign seem more like technical test runs, and I’m all for the devs at that studio getting to play in the space some more. Just… leave me out of the Tarkovs and the Fortnites of the world. I’ve only got so much time to kill.
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Kurt Indovina
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