We talked to Sharkmob co-founder Martin Hultberg about the studio’s next game, Exoborne.
Vampire the Masquerade–Bloodhunt developer Sharkmob brought its ambitious new game Exoborne to Tokyo Game Show, held over the weekend in Japan. Exoborne, an open-world extraction shooter that has players fight for survival in a broken world amid harsh weather, was featured with demo stations for players to try the game out early in the Level Infinite booth.
During the event, we caught up with Sharkmob’s co-founder Martin Hultberg about the upcoming game, including its exo-rigs, difficulty, and potential for sharknadoes.
Extraction’s shifting weather system
Exoborne is an extraction shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to shreds by extreme weather. Players will travel the wide-open map of Colton County, where they must scavenge for key resources and loot amid warring factions, enemy players, and dangerous forces of nature.
These forces of nature are arguably Exoborne’s flashiest gameplay mechanic, exo-rigs aside; a match can go south very quickly when tornadoes, lightning strikes, and terrifying storms strike in the middle of battle. However, Sharkmob co-founder Martin Hultberg tells us that we might be able to take advantage of worsening weather, rather than be impeded by it:
"You can use your glider to just gain altitude, and then you can bail out of the tornado when you want, and use that to move. But you can also do it to just spin around, until you get elevation and then dive down towards an enemy.”
Players have exo-rigs that they can mod out to achieve certain perks and gameplay abilities. These rigs can also provide benefits to the weather system, Hultberg says. “If you have an Exo rig that has certain mods, it can recharge its energy source based on lightning. So if you run into a lightning storm and you get hit, you'll get a benefit from it. Other players might get harmed by it.”
On the matter of sharknadoes
Exoborne’s forces of nature also interact with tornadoes in interesting ways. When tornadoes touch burning objects, they turn into fire tornadoes. When they travel through toxic gases, they turn into plumes of toxic vapour threatening to suffocate unaware players. Forces of nature change their damage type depending on their movement, making it so that players can never fully prepare for the sudden appearance of a fire tornado.
Hultberg explains:
“If a tornado moves over something that burns, it changes into a firenado, so now all of a sudden, it's full of fire, and if you get caught in a firenado, you're probably going to burn up, unless you have an extra rig that's been modified to withstand fire. If the tornado moves across something that's toxic, it becomes a toxinado like a cloud of toxic vapor that's flying around, that can suffocate you. So you’ve got to be careful with the tornadoes, because they can change their damage type, depending on how they move around the map.”
Of course, that led us to wonder: if tornados simply suck up whatever they run over on the map, is there a possibility of Sharkmob including actual sharknadoes in this game? Hultberg laughs when we pose the question. “I love this question. I’m going to give you a small anecdote from our previous game, Bloodhunt–I don’t know if you played it?”
Unfortunately, I haven’t.
“So there was a map set in Prague, and half of it is surrounded by a river that runs through the city, and we use that as the edge of the world that defines this one side of the map, right? But then we also needed to explain why you couldn't cross the river, because you're a vampire, so you can’t drown. So we added sharks to the river. So if you jump into the river, the shark eats you, and so you're insta-killed.”
“And everyone thought I was hilarious, and they tried it out at least once, and then they realized they can't be in the water. So now back to your question, do we have sharks in this game? And are there sharks in the tornado? I'm not gonna spoil too much, but it would be lovely if there was such a thing as a shark in a tornado, and then we'll see what happens from there.”
We’ll take that as a maybe!
Bullet-jumping parachutes in a tornado. Wait, what?
Before the interview took place, I had the chance to sit down and play a match of Exoborne with fellow members of the media. The match didn’t last very long–as I stumbled along in getting acquainted with the game’s weather systems, abilities, and resources, my team was downed before managing an extraction.
Something I noticed while playing is that the heavy winds stirred up by nearby tornadoes can pick up players when they jump, and allow them to deploy a parachute on ground level. Simply double jump and hold the button to initiate a glide, and the parachute gets picked up by the tornado’s winds, jerking the player forward to cover wider swathes of the map. It’s a fun feature to discover on the fly in a game like this, though I wondered if it was intentional.
Hultberg confirms that it is, in fact, a feature:
“We consider it a feature, and like all features, it can be balanced, but the actual movement and traversal is what we're interested in. After a while, you get pretty good at combining the grappler with a parachute and jumps, so you're moving very fluidly across the map. And there's a drawback to that, because the grappler makes noise when you fire it, so other players will probably hear you from further away, and you can tell that players who have played a bit, adapt their movement pattern after the risk of PvP, right? So when you get to certain areas where you think there are other players, you are less fluid in the air, because you're more of a target and you're easy to spot.”
“We want to find something that gives you mobility and freedom, but also needs to be balanced so it doesn't become this impossible thing to counter or become too hard to use.”
With just one force of nature causing so much chaos on the map, it’s easy to imagine what Exoborne will become in the future: a game that thrives on chaos and unpredictable gameplay, where PvP matches can quickly turn into a battle for survival as the world itself becomes a threat. We ask Hultberg if there are plans for more forces of nature to come in the game’s future, a concept that he seems quite open to:
“We made a fairly open-ended system that allows us to add more forces of nature as we go. The way it kind of works is that it is connected to the environment you're in. So, for example, an avalanche, you need snow. You're probably up in the mountains. So, you know, that's probably a different map, or whatever, but we can definitely add more forces of nature if we want to.”
Exoborne won’t be free-to-play
Exoborne is launching as a premium-priced game, which is something of a rarity these days. More and more studios seem to be pivoting to the free-to-play monetisation model for multiplayer games, getting players into their game more easily while simultaneously tempting them to spend more with battle passes, cosmetics, and seasonal content.
When we ask Hultberg about why the game is going the premium-priced route, he explains that it was something that simply made the studio more comfortable during development:
“Oh, there are many reasons. I think. When we released Bloodhunt, that was a free-to-play game, but most of the people at the studio come from a premium background. Free-to-play is very, very hard if you're not really accustomed to working with it, so I think premium is a bit more comfortable for us, just based on history.”
Making Exoborne a premium-priced game also allows Sharkmob to counter in-game cheating. “We all want to play good games with stable servers, and stable playing environments, right? Whenever these cheaters appear, it always turns bad, so there are a couple of considerations going into it, but actually creating a premium experience is one of the major things.”
Exoborne's future content plans
Exoborne is planned for launch on PC via Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. We ask Hultberg if there are any plans for a Nintendo Switch 2 port of the game down the line. However, we see the Sharkmob developer at his most tight-lipped yet here, unfortunately, as he simply tells us: “No plans currently.”
How about the game’s upcoming battle passes; will they be limited-time seasonal drops, or permanent additions for players to acquire and grind for–like Marvel Rivals or Halo Infinite? “We haven't released any information on that,” Hultberg says, “so we'll talk more about that later when we get closer to launch.”
Alas, it appears that much of the game’s monetisation plans are under wraps for now. When we ask Hultberg about the game’s post-launch plans, however, he seems more open to sharing details. He begins by saying, “Yeah, again, I can't give details because we haven't released it.”
Oh.
“... But, we can just look at what you typically do in a game like this. It's weapons, it is maps down the line, changing existing maps, all of that stuff is fairly traditional, so I think it's safe to say we're going to do similar things. We can also, like I said, add forces of nature. We also have a system that allows us, in theory, to add more exo-rigs. So I'm not committing to adding more extra rigs, but in theory, we could.”
One last thing: the Naked Run
Lastly, we ask Hultberg: what has he been enjoying the most about Exoborne during the current playtests? The developer has a very specific answer:
“So I have one thing that I started doing a lot in the latest play test that I found very enjoyable, and we nicknamed it the Naked Run.”
Wait, what?
“You drop in without any weapons and anything. Then you start moving around. You use melee to kill one of the bandits, you take his gun, and then you try to snowball your way up, which I think was a very fun way of playing. And also it means you rarely lose that much, because you're not dropping in with much. So I enjoyed that, and you're still quite competitive. If you get some good guns, you can still go up against fairly equipped players. I did it a couple of times myself, and that's a real powerful feeling, having a pretty crappy gun and still being, in theory, the more equipped player. That's pretty fun, right?
That does sound great, I say. Almost great enough to be a new game mode somewhere down the line?
“Could very well be, it was way more fun than we thought it would be!”
Exoborne does not have a release date yet, but the game is currently available for playtesting from 16 September to 7 October, 2025. Check out our early impressions of the game here.
