Ink & Bytes
Ink & Bytes
Episode Eleven - Extraction Shooters
Escape from Tarkov set the stage, but are you ready for the intense evolution it spawned in the gaming world? Strap in as I take you on a high-octane journey through the fast-growing realm of extraction shooters, a genre where every decision could mean the difference between digital life and death. In this heart-pounding episode, we dissect the allure and adrenaline-fueled gameplay that's luring players away from traditional FPS games and into the immersive worlds of titles like Hunt: Showdown and the innovative Grey Zone Warfare. With personal anecdotes and seasoned insight, I peel back the layers of these games, revealing the persistent worlds, realistic health systems, and the nail-biting tension that defines them, all while navigating the turbulent waters of early access pitfalls like server woes and optimization hurdles.
As the digital gunfire echoes into the future, I cast a gaze towards 2024—a year that could very well mark the zenith of extraction shooters. Find out why the upcoming Arena Breakout Infinite might just revolutionize our beloved genre and challenge the throne of Tarkov. Join me, and let's explore together the virtual landscapes where every play is a story, every shot is a gamble, and every extraction is a pulse-pounding triumph.
let's do this shit. I don't have a plan. We're just here for moment. We cracked open a cold one with the boys the boys aka me because everyone else is super busy with life stuff right now, just as I am, and we're literally just going to be talking about extraction shooters. What's going on with the market? Why is there this trend of extraction shooters? Where did it start?
Speaker 1:And what is Grey Zone Warfare, a game that I have made content on, I have streamed that, I've wrote in, wrote in, yeah, written blogs about, and I'm going to close my conversation of the game with the grand finale, also known as this podcast. So thank you all for joining me for this unhinged episode of ink and bites and let's just jump into it and see what happens, because I honestly have no idea. I'm kidding, I'm, I'm, I have an idea. I'm not as unprepared as I make it seem. But what are extraction shooters and why do people like them so much? Simply put, an extraction shooter is a genre of game, particularly fps's, but if you want to be wild, there are some third-person ones out there and these games share, and some are significantly more unforgiving as others. So in these games, if you die with stuff that you have during your mission or raid or session, you lose all of it. And for a lot of sane people unlike me, who is not sane this type of game you would never want to play, because why would you want to spend hours to get stuff and then lose it when you die to some some crap? But that is what draws the most people. It gives them an adrenaline rush when they get into conflicts with other people and it's just something that a lot of other games, like call of duty, can't replicate, because when you're playing call of duty you're literally just waiting to get 360 no-scoped by some 10-year-old who just got an F on their fucking math quiz and they have to release their anger on some 40-year-olds in a Call of Duty lobby and everyone's screaming absurdities at each other. Because that's what we do as a human race, that's what we find enjoyment from, I guess.
Speaker 1:But the extraction shooter genre really started from a game that if you're a regular listener of the show have heard of, which is Escape from Tarkov. I really won't go much into the game because I talked about it to death, I read it about it to death, I play it too much and honestly I kind of hate it and love it at the same time. But Escape from Tarkov kind of originated this genre of shooter. It found its footing and it just blew up and because of that success a lot of other game studios have come out to try and replicate it. In the early days of this genre we had another competitor come out that I don't really classify too much as an extraction shooter, but most people do so it's fallen into that categorization and that is the hunt showdown, which is just a lot of cowboys with lever action rifles hunting down demons and monsters from hell trying to get their bounty and then extracting with it. It's in the same realm but personally it doesn't feel like an extractor shooter for me. I call extraction shooters the hardcore, realistic military shooters. Usually those are the ones I call extraction shooters. The science fiction ones and the wild west ones just feel like stylized survival shooters, if anything but a lot of moral of the story.
Speaker 1:A lot of competitors came out to try to steal the crown from escape from tarkov and no one has officially or effectively done so yet. Eft has really sat high on their throne for the longest time and the popular saying was nobody can kill Escape from Tarkov other than Escape from Tarkov and that's almost what they did with the unheard of drama. Check out my episode before this for a full breakdown on that, because it's a wild story and that really opened up the floodgates for this trend to kind of grow faster than it has, because for years we've only really had escape from targoth and the hunt showdown. Every other extraction shooter really never made success or headlines and there's a lot of failed attempts.
Speaker 1:But because of the drama and the mass exodus of a lot of players from EFT, a lot of these other games started to get a lot of attention and a lot of footing. Two of those games are Grey Zone Warfare or GZW, and Arena Breakout Infinite, which this is kind of nutty was actually a phone game first and now is being ported over to PC and riddle me this Batman. But it looks kind of fucking amazing, which is confusing that it's coming from a phone game and I've played it and it's actually pretty good and I went into that thinking it was going to be a candy crush but with guns and it's actually pretty well developed and I'm looking forward to that coming out. They're doing a lot of beta testing as of as of now and it's almost close to coming out. But Grey Zone Warfare is what I really kind of want to chat about, go over what it is, some pros and cons, and just give my thoughts on it. So Grey Zone Warfare is an open world extraction shooter Keyword on the open world.
Speaker 1:All of these other games in the genre are instance based, meaning you select an area that you want to go to and you load into it and you duke it out with other people, ai and loot and try to leave. Grazen Warfare takes that and flips it on its head and gives you an entire open world that is persistent, that keeps going even if you're not playing. People are always going in, leaving, doing quests, leaving AI or living in the world, and that is the main draw of the game for a lot of people, me included, because one issue that we've had with escape from tarkov and other games is that not other games pretty much escape from tarkov because that's the one big game here. Everybody in that ecosystem have been playing the game for many years, to the point where they know exactly what you're going to do, when you're going to do it and what quests are active at the time, depending on when in the wipe you're playing, because notoriously, escape from Tarkov resets itself every six or so months with new content and everyone's back to square zero. But it's been a repeated cycle for so long that the sweats of the game know everything and it's very hard for casual players to break into it. There are or the average play time of an EFT nerd is like 4,000 hours. If anybody has under 4,000 hours, people actually just report them for cheating. It's actually kind of crazy, but with an open world setting, people no longer can down to a science pinpoint where you are and what you're doing. Instead, it adds this element of unpredictability to every game session that you play, because it's persistent. No one's starting. At the same time, you can go into an area that someone's been in for an hour and it's just. It's so refreshing.
Speaker 1:This game just came out recently and it's currently sitting in early access on steam, but it's also in very early alpha. The devs have come out to state madffinger Games that it is 20% completed and there are a lot of good things. I already mentioned one of them the open world, persistence, all of that stuff. There's also a lot of bad, so let me just finish up with the good and then we'll look at the bads. There is a lot of tasks in the game. There's 150 tasks and the progression of those tasks are really nice. So when you first start off and you're playing for the first time, all of your tasks are going to be in the starter town of your faction and every faction has the same town at the start. And once you progress through those, well, I think there's like there's too many in the starter town. There's like 12 or 13 of them. But After you complete those, the game progresses in a manner that tasks become harder and you get to start being pushed inland to other points of interest that are marked on the map, that are likely to bring you into conflict with other players from other factions, which is really nice, because the progression in other extraction shooters doesn't really feel like that. It just feels like here are things to do, do them. But in this it kind of feels like you're progressing through. I don't want to say a story yet, but you're progressing through, uh, just a nice challenge, difficulty ladder and the other pretty neat thing that other games don't have.
Speaker 1:You can argue that escape from tarkov has it with choosing usek or bears the gris and warfare kind of feels like it's more in depth with their faction system. There's three of them that you can pick from. Each have their own story uh, mithras or I can't remember all the top of my hand, but something like that crimson shield and lemang recovery initiative. And the lemang recovery initiative is more altruistic, trying to help people on the island. Of course, because I'm a nice human being, I picked that. But it's really cool because it adds this role play element to the game. And the devs classify gray zone warfare as an mmo, which I kind of find myself struggling to really agree with. Doesn't feel too much like an mmo outside of the uh gameplay style. But it's really neat to have these factions and they're saying that there's going to be I hope anyway that there's going to be a faction specific quests. That would be pretty cool to see to kind of influence people to try other factions as time goes on. But it's a really neat system.
Speaker 1:I don't think any of the other games really capitalize on that as much as gzw does. The realism elements as well are spot on. The guns feel nice, the armor actually feels like you're wearing armor and when you get shot you feel it. The health system is really in depth, just like escape from tarkov, but instead in gzw also have an added layer of organ damage and that is like a whole another layer of complexity. But like if you're shot in your lungs, you get a special debuff that makes you cough and you have to heal that. And the animations for all those things are really slick. I actually I hate needles. I think needles are gross and I can't stand them. But there's a animation that involves needles pretty extensively and I actually have to look away because it makes me cringe. That's how you tell the animators did a really good job, because that's never happened to me before. But all that being said, there's so much awesome in this game at the current stage that it's at for being only 20% completed and unfortunately a lot of people have.
Speaker 1:This is going to be a segue into the negatives of the game. The game isn't optimized at all and there's a lot of server instability. It's getting better each day, but this has caused a lot of people to go on the forums and slam their face against their keys and insult the devs, demand financial compensation, insult other people who like the game, and it's kind of funny. I just sit back with popcorn and read some of these things because you can tell they just got out of high school and they just need to vent because If the game doesn't run on their supercomputer it's a bad game. So that's the thought process there. It's not really that deep, but the game is early access and early alpha and they make that very clear. But it's the same phenomena that happens in almost every early access title. People always go in thinking that it's going to be a completed game and then they get disappointed when it's not the game's only 20 completed but the this, the optimization warranted, is really bad and if your computer is outdated you're likely not going to be able to run it, or if you do, it's going to run very badly, but all it requires really is some tinkering to figure out what settings are best for you.
Speaker 1:There's a lot more to video games than just graphics. I think. As we get spoiled by better graphics and engines and software that make games look stunning, to the point where you honestly don't know what's real anymore, we've lost the fact that games are things we play to enjoy. Games are narrative, they're experiences, they're glimpses into other perspectives and it's just painful that we kind of forgot in a lot of that and we only look at. Is rock cool enough? Does water reflect? Can I look at mirror and see face? It's like we evolved back into apes in that concept. But just mess with settings and there's gonna be a combo setting that works for you.
Speaker 1:Just, we need to go back to a time where games are more than just graphics, that they were playable experiences. So there's been a lot of negative feedback in that element of the game, but thankfully, what that's going to do is it's going to weed out the people who don't have patience and don't have any actual valid criticisms to bring to the game. So the people who are left are going to be people who actually kind of have more of a grasp on how these things work and will have valuable feedback. We just need to be more constructive about these things, especially since it's so early and a lot of this feedback is going to mold how the devs go about the game. And, speaking of the devs, they have shown that they're really motivated and this game isn't a tarkov killer like everybody and their mother was saying when it was being teased. And, matter of fact, we got access to this game significantly sooner than we were supposed to because the whole unheard drama moved up their timetable to where they decided they made a business decision to release it now to get in front of as many escape from tarkov refugees as they could. It was a smart business decision. Could it be argued that they should have waited an extra week or two to make sure the servers were good and the optimization was a little bit better? That argument can be made, but it was still a good decision. That has proven to be worth it, because they jumped to the top of steam sale charts and they made a lot of profit from it, which is then being reinvested into the game. That's speculative. We can never assume what devs are going to do, but from the interviews they had, they've been very vocal with their community. The reception to them has been good and they seem really motivated to make this game fantastic and maybe possibly make it close to an escape from tarkov killer. That it can be, because it has a fantastic amount of potential.
Speaker 1:But outside of the optimization and service stability things, there's a lot of scummy things that people do, like what's called landing zone camping or lz camping. Now this game genre invites the scummiest of human beings out there that exist purely to ruin your day. Escape from tarkov has this in exit campers who sit in the exit and will kill you after you basically grabbed everything you needed or spent 30 minutes wasting your time. It's just going to be something. It's human nature. There's some people that are going to want to seek out the ways to punish other people and make their lives hell, so unfortunately, that's just a side effect of the game.
Speaker 1:Thankfully, there's a. There's a fix in the works. They're looking at ways to mitigate landing zone campers, which is pretty nice. People suggested having just guns on the helicopters that auto-target these people, or smoke screen, or invulnerability when you land. Personally, I'm a fan of the invulnerability, because having a minigun that auto targets people kind of doesn't seem like it's going to answer the problem. There are a lot of times where people aren't exit camping. They're just passing by or they're trying to leave themselves. I've had people land right next to me when I'm traversing the map and I'm not trying to exit camp them, I'm just trying to leave. But you have to defend yourself. So that's. Those are really the biggest issues. If you want to read more of the granular negatives, feel free to check out my blog at the-worldbuildercom. The-world-buildercom, you know Fridays.
Speaker 1:Today is an interesting one and there I kind of go over in depth everything I like and hate about the game. But it's worth it. It's a really, really awesome game and I'm so glad to see that there's competition happening because I, honestly, as much as I love EFT and as much as that's my online content creation persona, it is really painful to play. It is such a hard game to play casually and it's just so nice to have other games to go to that fit that or that scratch that itch in a different way.
Speaker 1:The only other game that is going to come close to defeating targov is arena breakout infinite. Now that is the closest thing to eft. Gray zone warfare is basically in its entire own world of extraction shooter. Arena breakout infinite has undeniably clear influence from escape from targoth. That's the game that the developers, nikita and so on, actually went out and insulted, calling them a copycat and a ripoff, an infringement on their property, and you can see it has influence. But I don't think it's an asset flip or a copy, but moral of the story. It's just so freaking nice to see competition.
Speaker 1:It's like I'm a or I shouldn't say I it's like extraction shooter fans are starved in the middle of the Sahara desert with one drop of water left and just hoping that a mirage of an oasis appears on the horizon. And finally that mirage is kind of cementing itself into something real and 2024 seems to be the year of extraction shooters. I'm coining that right now, 2024 is the year of extraction shooters, but either way, I'm really excited to see what happens. So I'm going to wrap this up here, because I have a shit ton of energy and I'm just rambling and that's probably coming through.
Speaker 1:But you know what. You only live once. Got to energy and I'm just rambling and that's probably coming through. But you know what. You only live once gotta. Gotta do what you like, right. So thank you for listening to this hyped up on caffeine madman talking about video games again, I am getting ready to move, so the coming months might be quiet, but once I'm set up and hopefully I have a routine in place and hopefully I can manage to survive in this new environment, I'm going to Things will go back to normal. I'll have a regular content schedule again. So thank you so much for hanging out with me. I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you in the next one.
