This is a sort-of follow-up to Story vs Gameplay. I found another good example of how I’d prefer games approach story.
Exoprimal finally had its first sale as well as a free weekend over this weekend so I took the opportunity to check it out. Been keeping an eye on it since launch, I’m glad I waited. I really like it, I also really like how the story is presented. It contextualizes all the goofiness of mass dinosaur slaying but does so in a way that mostly stays out of the gameplay’s way, except for the kind-of-lengthy series of introductory cutscenes and tutorials.
It’s sort of unique in that it’s hard to find an all-encompassing “it’s like X [but with Y]”. It’s a PvPvE game but not like Tarkov, it’s leaning more towards something like Overwatch. There’s shades of stuff like Anthem and Evolve in here too. It’s an intermittently competitive multiplayer, live service, matchmaking-based hero shooter. Most matches take place over two rounds, the first round is always a PvE race between two teams of 5 over a series of waves of dinosaur enemies. The second round is similar, objective-based gameplay but will have either a PvE or PvP component. If desired you can queue for either PvE or PvP games but it’s impossible to completely avoid some competitive elements since even standard PvE second rounds are foremost races against the other team, and also allow one person from each team to invade the other team’s game as a boss dino to attempt to slow the other team down. However, sometimes there’s a surprise raid boss or mission that spontaneously puts both teams together and those are always delightful and chaotic.1
There’s two layers to how the game presents the story progression. The first does double duty as gating for the mechanical progression of gameplay (there’s a problem here we’ll come back to); after every so many matches you’re given either a special story mission or a cutscene that advances the story (or both). In addition to this, every mission you’re finding little lore bits (effectively, optional cutscenes) that are pieced together to tell you a more fleshed out version of the same story’s mysteries, so there’s a defined baseline main story that you have to move through (but skippable cutscenes if you’re an utter gameplay purist) and optional ways to engage with the unfolding plot in more detail. It’s great, and while I always had a competing tension between wanting to queue for the next game and wanting to explore every new lore bit as it came in, I always had the option of jumping into the next game and saving the mystery stuff for when I had some downtime. It even scratches something of a progression itch to where I’m worried I have less of a reason to continue playing now that I’ve finished the story2.
The one major thing that’s awkward about this style of storytelling is that it sort of hamstrings the matchmaking. Since it can’t give you maps and scenarios a newer player hasn’t progressed to, you end up doing a lot of the lower-tier content repeatedly to match what the least-experienced player in your match has progressed to. The game also has story-relevant missions you can get matched into and while this is fine and cool3 they come with some kind of lengthy unskippable cutscenes that tend to get annoying after the first time.
So yeah, Exoprimal. Solid recommend.
While I think it would kind of spoil the spirit of the game to be able to opt out of certain types of content I do think it would be nice if you could pick weighted preferences, on one hand I’d like to be able to do the frantic 10-man stuff a little more often but on the other hand I can queue always expecting the normal stuff and then it’s always a great surprise when the unusual stuff happens.
It’s also nice and fine that it skips over having a contrivance for why the game still happens after the story ends.
It’s funny to me knowing I’m responsible for roping up to 9 other people into the story mission I’m on, and then in the inverse knowing someone else roped me into their story mission when I repeat it again later.