Exoborne has been one of those battle royales with a unique traversal hook that I’ve been curious about but never had the chance to go hands-on with until Summer Game Fest 2025’s Play Days. The concept of fighting off not just other players but the weather seemed like a concept that would keep fights feeling dynamic between sessions.
Sharkmob and Level Infinite let us jump into a quick three-player match after a brief bit of onboarding and watching a mission cutscene from one of their key NPC handlers. After that, we were permitted to look at and pick just one of the three Exo-rig’s they wanted to show off. My two teammates went with the more nimble Viper while I opted for the heavier Kodiak. Despite all of my ziplining around and attacking from above, I didn’t get to try out most of his kit and instead just stuck with sniping and machine-gunning as they were more than effective against the majority of AI grunts we encountered (there were other players in our match, but we extracted once we bumped into them without much of a drawn out firefight).
Exoborne’s gunplay is fairly standard stuff, with various weapons having enough impact to feel like you’re not just shooting Nerf pellets at the enemy troops while not having enough recoil to knock you out of your Exo-rig. With Exoborne being focused on being a faster-paced run-and-gun format, leaning into an arcade-style for gunplay lends itself to a more enjoyable experience over some of the more hardcore extraction shooters
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In speaking with one of the developers from Sharkmob before my interview with Martin Holberg (co-founder at the studio and a narrative director on the game), it’s clear that they’ve done a large overhaul to the mechanics and progression for Exoborne throughout the various beta tests, from retaining your Exo-rig on death to supporting separate progression tracks to each rig. Extraction shooters are becoming a busier and busier market to compete with and it looks like Sharkmob is taking the closed beta feedback to heart in order to hit the ground running when Exoborne launches later this year.
For gamers that might be seeing Exoborne for the first time, can you give us a quick rundown on what this project is?
Absolutely. Exoborne is a tactical extraction shooter. You play as an Exowarrior in the United States that’s being torn apart by these apocalyptic forces of nature, and that happens as you play the game.
During a session, you scavenge and fight to stay alive. It’s an extraction shooter. You fight your way in, you try to achieve an objective, you fight your way out, and hopefully, you survive long enough to extract yourself and get out of the session. You can prolong that experience by doing certain activities in the session.
There is something called a rebirth trace timer that keeps track of you as you move around. Eventually, that timer is going to identify you on the map for all other players to see. That’s your hint that you should have gotten out already, because now you’re kind of marked. You can extend that timer so it takes longer before you get marked on the map,
How does extraction work in your game?
The only way to get out is through the extraction ships. There are a number of extraction points on the map, and not all of them are active at any given time. The weather can affect which ones are active, and there’s also a random dynamic to it. The first thing you really want to do when you drop in is kind of look at which of these zones are active for extraction, and then you plan your activity.
Ok. It’s probably one dropship per extraction point, so if a player team goes there and they extract, there won’t be another ship called in right away, right?
No, you’re calling in one ship at a time and then there’s a cooldown on that extraction point. If you’re another team, you would have to wait a while to call in the next one. But you could also kill the ones trying to extract and take their extraction, or you could just go up, shake their hand, and all of you can get on board. But that rarely happens.
Do you have an emote system in there for that sort of thing?
We’re actually looking at that now. I know it’s on the design team’s table. I haven’t gotten the latest update on that, so I’m going to leave that as a maybe.
In the PR materials for Exoborne, we saw highway signs for Albany. Does this mean that the game will be set in the northeastern reaches of the US?
The game takes place in a fictional place that we call Colton County. It’s a place we made up just because we wanted to be able to create our own sandbox to play in, right? And we always imagined Colton County located somewhere in the southeastern USA. We’re still keeping it a bit vague, but it’s not an accurate portrayal of any specific location. But yeah, there are traffic signs to real locations.
We got to see three of the different Exorigs that players will have access to. Roughly how many are you planning to have at launch for Exoborne?
At launch, there will be the three rigs you saw today, plus one we use for tutorial and onboarding. It’s a much simpler thing. We just use it to teach you the basic power. The three you saw here are the three we’re shipping with.
And what sort of upgrades will players get as they dedicate time to each of the rigs?
Each of these has some bespoke modules that are unique to each model. Then there are a number of shared modules that you can apply to every one of them. It can be different stuff, like, it can affect your movement speed, it can affect your grappling hook’s speed. It can be lightning resistance or fire resistance, that type of stuff. You try to configure your exorig to fit your optimal playstyle or preference in combat.
Are they more like static modifications, or will there be some that add in new abilities or change how an ability works?
We have both direct abilities and stats that change based on the mods. You can call in an air strike, you can cloak, you can put down a cloak field, you can put down a minefield. There’s a bunch of offensive capabilities and also some defensive capabilities. The other ones are more along what I mentioned previously, affecting your run speed or like grappler, cooldowns, and stuff like that.
What’s the length of the grapple, roughly?
That’s a very good design question. I’m going to have to get back to you with an answer on that because I don’t know it. It’s also quite different depending on how you modify it, but we can get you an exact answer if you want to.
I was experimenting right around the 15 to 20 m range when I got it to be really reliable.
I would say it’s around 20 m, but I can’t give you an exact number.
How many different weapon types are available in Exoborne?
I will have to count them in my head because I don’t know the exact number. We have sniper rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, submachine guns, pistols, light machine guns. I’m sure I forgot one or two, so I would say 6 or 7 different types, and then many variants of those. None of them is limited to a specific rig.
How large are each of the maps?
Maynard is the biggest one. I’m struggling to remember exactly the size of it, but Maynard is quite big. It’s a very big open. You can use cars to drive across it. The other one, the mid-size one we call Agnesville, and that’s an urban area, so it is smaller in terms of the size, but it has way more vertical space because you’ve got more rooftops, you’ve got indoors. It plays very differently.
The smaller one is essentially quite a large sinkhole that’s about 1 kilometer big, and it’s like a big hole where you need to go down and do certain things, so it’s a very intense area.
When you’re moving into a much denser area, like you mentioned, that limits a lot of the mobility options there.
Yeah, exactly. The Exorigs are made for traversal. That’s one of the key components. That works absolutely best when you’re outside, when you can either move freely on the wind, grappling up on cliffs or on buildings. When you go inside, it becomes more of a traditional tactical shooter because now you’re locked in a hallway or locked into a room. That changes pacing, the tactics you apply, and to a certain degree, it also changes what you can use your Exorig for. But we still have some fairly large indoors as well where you can use some of these things to your advantage, like grappling hooks to get up on catwalks.
Are any of these levels modular, where you might see them play out a little bit differently, or is every map bespoke?
The layout is the same, it’s static, but the weather patterns are always different, so that’s dynamic.
Is there any building destruction in Exoborne?
We have destructible objects. The buildings themselves are not destructible, but many of the props and objects out in the world are. For example, fences and low walls and stuff like that can be either crushed if you run too fast with your Exorig. You can drive through them with cars, or you can shoot them or blow them up.
We saw tornadoes. We did see firenados and others. Can players throw like a Molotov or an incendiary grenade and turn a tornado into a firenado?
Yes. You can either use a Molotov to do that, or you can shoot an exploding barrel and cause a fire and the tornado becomes a firenado. You can do similar things with toxic substances. If you shoot a container with gas in it, then it carries the gas with it.
Are there any plans to have a weather forecast? It wouldn’t have to be exact, just to get a rough idea of the conditions before starting a map.
We’ve thought a lot about that. I know design has been struggling a bit with that. We want you to be able to have some degree of anticipation so you can load your equipment, because otherwise it doesn’t really make sense, right? You want to prepare for a certain set of conditions. At the same time, we do want it to change on the map. I’m just going to have to say we’re going to get back to you on that with more details.
This isn’t your first multiplayer title, with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt being the previous one from Sharkmob. What sort of lessons did you learn about what players enjoy most about a multiplayer game?
In Exoborne, we’ve spaced out the verticality a bit more, so it’s harder to quickly break those lines of sight. You’re going to have to commit to the fight more than you did in that game. Besides gameplay stuff like that, there’s also learnings around cheating, how to plan live content, and at the same time provide updates and bug fixes, and all of that stuff. It’s way more complicated than you’d think initially to be able to both proactively produce content and, at the same time, maintain what’s running live right in front of you. So a lot of good lessons on the simple practical stuff of running a game like that.
What anti-cheat solution are you using?
We’ve got to get back to you on that one. The only thing I can say is that we’ve invested a lot of thought and time into it, but we’re also quite wary about releasing too many details about it for the obvious reasons of maybe not wanting to spill the beans on it.
Is PC the only platform or just the primary platform for Exoborne?
It’s more like the first platform for us. We will do PC and console, but we will do PC first and then consoles will follow.
Battle Pass?
There will be a Battle Pass, we can say that. The game is full of cosmetics, vanity, and customizing your character. Not just how it plays, but also how it looks is very important to us. That’s another one of those things we kind of fell in love with Bloodhunt, where we had a lot of customization options. You will definitely be able to have a lot of diversity in how you set up a character.
One thing that’s unique about Exoborne is that, rather than picking upper and bottom layers, you’re picking the entire outfit. Will players be able to have different colors for a given outfit?
I don’t think we have different colors on the outfits. We have different variants of the same. We have different uniform patterns, for example. It’s the same basic uniform, but with different patterns. On the Exorigs, we have more color options.
Because you have the vanity on your outfit, which is like your clothing, and then you have your Exorig where you have another set of vanity on top of that, like the skin for the actual Exorig and you have Helmets, you have facewear, and then your facial customization.
Will players be able to acquire the outfits in the game itself? Can they find a rare loot that might have an outfit?
I am pretty sure we have a reward system that rewards vanity.
Alright. Is there any sort of mastery system that incentivizes players to pick up one specific Exorig and specialize with it?
There’s a progression system tied to the Exorig, so it’s going to take time to max it out. Ideally, I think you would probably want to be able to use all of them because there’s a synergy between them, and you play in a team. So, if the entire team goes in with the same Exorig, that might not be optimal. Depending on who you play with, you might want to swap it out.
Going into the mission, we saw a loadout or gear score. What risks are there for players if they die in the world? What will they lose?
When you die, you lose everything except your Exorig, so you lose your guns and all. Well, you don’t lose the vanity either, so the Exorig and the vanity are safe. You lose your weapon, you lose your mods, you lose your inventory, you lose your armor. That’s what you lose when you die.
Is there any insurance system at play here where players might insure their primary weapons, so if they die and lose everything, they might be able to retain them?
But I want to kind of like caveat that a bit because what we are doing,
we’re running a lot of tests and each of these tests have generated feedback that we have taken and addressed in the game. For example, we did a progression overhaul, an inventory overhaul, we did a significant UX pass. The handler character that you probably saw when you played Styx who holds together much of the missions and we’re constantly looking for that feedback.
When it comes to the insurance thing, it’s one of those things where I’m saying currently we don’t have it. If we think we need, it we might add it, but right now, it’s not in the game. It’s one of those things where some players love it, some players hate it because they want every match to be incredibly high stakes. But sometimes it helps draw in players that might be a little risk-averse to go out there with those higher ranked weapons rather than just keeping them in your stash for another day.
That is the big challenge, right? If you have a very powerful weapon, the risk is that you’re too afraid to use it. I definitely get that desire, but there might be other ways to handle that and make sure you still feel like you can use your toy and not be afraid to lose it.
How will players be able to communicate in the world of Exoborne?
We have the ping system. We also have VoIP for both team and proximity chat, so you can communicate with other teams if you want to when you’re close to each other. Those are the main ways of doing it.
Will players be able to link multiple squads together if they want to ally towards the end of the match?
Currently, there is no system that allows that to happen mechanically, but there’s nothing that stops you from doing it on a gentleman’s agreement.
When will players be able to get their hands on Exoborne?
We recently had that public test. We are preparing to do more tests, and a date will be released in the not-so-distant future, but we’re not releasing that date yet.
What are your thoughts on collaborating with other brands or other games to create new content or cosmetics for Exoborne?
I think we’re always open to collaborations, and you can obviously do them in many different ways, right? We have a world that is very close to our own, so there are some brands that fit perfectly as a part of the universe, and those brand collaborations are very easy if they show up. Then there are collaborations which might be a bit more on the edge of, does that fit in our world? Then we’d have to take that discussion, but typically even in that case, you could have a temporary event where you do that kind of stuff. We’re always hoping for collaborations. It’s always fun.
Exoborne is so much about the gunplay, but would you consider having melee weapons in the future?
Each of the Exorigs today has a melee move, which you can use for different things. Personally, I mostly use it against NPCs. I’m not sure I would dare to go and try to get a player doing that as long as they have a gun, but I would absolutely say that I would not completely rule out melee weapons as a thing that could be added in the future. It’s how we work: we watch how people play and what they enjoy to do, and then we try to create more of that content, but there will definitely be no melee weapons at launch. It’s one attack per unit and that’s it.
Any other closing remarks you’d like to leave with our readers, Martin?
Like I said, we already made major improvements to this game based on feedback from people like your readers. I would be very happy to keep seeing their feedback and just to have them comment on stuff, participate in our play tests, and let us know what works and what doesn’t work. Often, what can be really helpful is why they think it doesn’t work. It’s one thing to say, oh, that thing is shit, but please elaborate and explain why you think it’s shit or why you think it’s awesome because that really helps us when we read the comments.
Thank you so much for your time.
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