ATTN: Weavers,
Over the last year of production, one of the biggest challenges we tackled was dialling in our mission structure.
After watching hours of gameplay and digging through user data, it became pretty clear that some of our lengthier, more linear missions didn’t quite feel right. They had strong moments, but the overall structure could sometimes feel too much like moving from A to B to C, rather than making meaningful decisions inside a dangerous space.
At the same time, the player response to Operation 1411’s more open-ended survival-meets-extraction style mission helped cement something for us: RIFTSTORM feels better when players have more agency over how far they want to push, when they want to leave, and what risks they are willing to take along the way.
Earlier this year, we integrated extraction mechanics into our mission structure. That meant adding extraction zones to missions and allowing players to leave with the resources and loot they had gathered, even if they had not completed every objective on the map.
We wanted to be very careful with this. The goal was not to suddenly turn RIFTSTORM into the expected “extraction shooter” experience, and instead to use extraction as a way to give players more control and make the punishment for failure feel meaningful without wiping out progress. Internally, we tested this by making our devs do 20 push-ups if they died or failed to extract. This was, of course, extremely scientific.
What we wanted was the part of extraction games that creates tension: deploying into a dangerous space, finding things you want or need, deciding whether to push a little deeper, and then trying to get out before shit hits the fan.
That change helped make our larger mission maps feel less like a chore list and more like a series of tactical risk-versus-reward decisions.
The result of that experimentation is what we call extraction-lite.
For us, that means building out a few features guided by our focus on power fantasy and player agency.
First, we added at least one extraction zone to every mission map, allowing players to leave the mission and keep whatever resources and weapons they have looted along the way. To support this, we also had to rework how we define success and failure in missions. Some objectives can now be partially completed, and certain extraction outcomes can be treated as partial success rather than a simple win-or-lose state.
Player death will still result in the loss of anything gained during that run, but it will not be as punishing as more traditional extraction shooters.
Instead of losing your entire inventory, we have implemented a Weapon Scarring mechanic. Total mission failure, whether by death, failure to extract, or abandoning a run by quitting, can result in one of your weapons having a mod replaced with a negative mod.
These broken mods will not make a weapon useless, but they may reduce its effectiveness or remove one of your favorite mods outright. While this may not be 1:1 with having to do 20 push-ups, the hope here is to make loot matter a little more, while still balancing punishment severity against the overall power fantasy of RIFTSTORM.
The constant lesson from our playtests has been simple: players enjoy the chaos.
We hope the systems we have built around our extraction-lite philosophy add to that chaos in the right way. Internal tests have already found broken mods that actually make certain weapons work better with certain builds, but we’ll let you guys discover those for yourselves.
We cannot wait to get players hands-on with these systems soon.
Until then, stay tuned.
Remember: the Protocol does not thrive on your misery.
Much.