Hunger Is An RPG In Extraction Shooter Clothing

Brothers Max and Rory Rea are working with the rest of Good Fun Corporation on an extraction shooter and slasher called Hunger, but if you asked them, they might tell you it’s an RPG gallivanting in the extraction genre. The Napoleonic era-set PvPvE game superficially looks a lot like Hunt: Showdown, but it has a surprisingly retro design ethos, despite the modern sheen given to it by Unreal Engine. Hunger is a title that hopes to avoid common frustrations of the extraction genre, focusing on deep character building and constant progression.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Max, the game director, and discussing Hunger while I was shown gameplay from a development build by Rory, who’s involved with QA testing. As expected from an extraction game, Hunger has you enter matches called Expeditions to complete quests, find loot, and survive against computer-controlled enemies and opposing players alike before escaping alive. While there were plenty of overtures regarding the extraction genre, more pertinent discussion revolved around the likes of old-school MMORPG Ultima Online and even Diablo 2. Still, the greatest inspiration for Hunger is, surprisingly, The Elder Scrolls.

Morrowind Is Hunger’s “North Star”

Hunger‘s Steam page makes it clear that the game is an extraction RPG, and I asked how the long-term progression of roleplaying games was melded with the core aspect of extraction shooters, where death means the loss of valuable resources. “It’s much more helpful to think about it as you would Oblivion or Skyrim or an RPG, rather than an extraction shooter,” said Max. At one point, he adds, “We kind of take cues from Morrowind. I’m a massive fan, such that…” he gets up out of his chair, leaving the video chat frame, and comes back holding a framed print of Morrowind‘s map, “such that I’ve got the map framed in my office because it feels like a bit of a North Star principle.”

“It might be the game that has had the biggest effect on Hunger. The level of deduction, the level of using that map to figure out where you’re going to go on quests, just reading the quests, I love it,” he says.

Rory adds, “That is a rare experience these days. I remember playing on console, and we would have the map up to help navigate, the physical map in our hands.” Max agrees: “That, thinking about it, is probably one of the strongest influences on the game, from an RPG perspective.” And from what I’ve seen, it does look like Hunger is an RPG at its core, molded into the gameplay loop of an extraction shooter.

You play as one of the Living, a character who has not been subsumed by the mindlessly violent hordes called the Hunger; victims of the mysterious Bacterium. In your attempt to eke out a living, you scavenge for resources on Expeditions, and dying still means you’ll forfeit your items, but progression has been moved “away from gear and vendors to the character you play and leveling that character.” Everything you do will reward experience, from killing another player to looting a chest, but “quests are one of the most efficient ways to gain experience,” and questing appears to be the heart of Hunger.

Build Your Character As You Follow Myriad Questlines In Hunger

Mastery Trees Force You To Choose A Playstyle

You set out on Expeditions from the Chateau, a hub world filled with eccentrics. Each one has a personal questline, which buoys Hunger‘s overarching narrative. Quests will be a mixture of exploring locations and finding specific items. They’re often map-specific, and can even be multi-stage quests within a single map. For example, if a vendor at Chateau asks you to look for a clue at one location, that clue will lead you to another point of interest, and so on. As you complete quests and earn more general experience, you’ll take a character through 100 levels.

You’ll also work your way through Mastery trees, selecting skills to specialize in how your character approaches Expeditions. Max used “what is colloquially referred to as a ‘rat’ class” as an example:

“[By choosing certain skills], you’ve made your visual and auditory impact much less, and you’re able to lock pick doors, you’re examining loot in a very, very quick time, you’re able to carry more loot… and the way our skill tree sets it up is if you specialize in that manner, it’s a detriment to the other ways you could specialize because we don’t want a character who’s just incredible at everything. You build toward a specific end-goal play style, at the sacrifice of other things. We feel that the amount of stuff that we’re offering within the Mastery tree is really broad, that there are a ton of different ways to tune your experience.”

Also, to keep characters from becoming all-powerful, Hunger‘s weapons and armor have been balanced to ensure the former always remain lethal. “The best armor in the game will, at best, give you one or two shots more survivability than someone coming in without armor at all,” I was told; equipping armor is a way to “paper over mistakes you might make,” rather than making anyone’s character nigh impossible to kill. “You definitely want to be playing as a top-level player, with a great gun, with the best armor in the game,” says Max, “but it doesn’t make you un-killable or superhuman.”

There’s a real emphasis on existing within the game world, much like you would in an RPG. You chat with vendors and learn about their stories, and you help them resolve personal conflicts through the quest system. “We’ve tried to keep it really in the vein of an RPG,” Max said, “making sure it feels more like an Oblivion or a Skyrim [quest] than, you know, just dropping into a PvP arena.” The loot you collect is “an accelerant” to earning experience and building your character so you can more effectively explore war-torn, zombie-filled, early 19th century Europe.

When you reach certain milestones, you unlock more characters, so you can try different play styles:

“The game is designed to be played almost like an MMORPG, where you play one character through to level 100 […]. So what we’ve tended to see is players will build a character into one thing suitable to that character – so if I want to play a loot hoarder character, I’ll build my mastery tree out to be that […]. Then I’ll take a second character who is built around sustaining a team.“

When you reach maximum level, you’ll have the opportunity to prestige. This will reset that character to level one, wipe their Mastery trees, and unlock a legendary cosmetic item that can only be earned through the prestige mechanic. According to the developers, Hunger wants you to feel rewarded, and like you continually making progress, with plenty of avenues to do so. Despite its deep roleplaying mechanics (and they do seem deep, I saw Rory scroll through multiple skill trees), Hunger is still well within the extraction genre, but it wants to set new precedents.

There Will Not Be Wipes

The extraction genre is known to be cutthroat, and it typically doesn’t coddle players, often erasing all your hard work when you die, or leveling the playing field for the entire playerbase with a wipe. Hunger isn’t interested in taking progress away from you, even if you lose the loot you die holding: “You never want to die, but because every action in the game gives you experience, even if you die on an Expedition, you’ll come away with a nice amount of experience. It’s not wasted time.”

Good Fun Corporation hopes that continuing to build characters and earn unique cosmetics is enough incentive for players to prestige, which “effectively is a self-wiping mechanic.” Such player agency and long-term build crafting hope to separate Hunger from the rest of the extraction genre, but it still contains many hallmarks. Hunger‘s sound design is a major informant for the gameplay loop, much like it is in Hunt: Showdown or the recently tech-tested ARC Raiders.

“When you fire a gun on the map, everyone on the map will be able to hear that noise,” says Max. And such consequences recursively feed back into the RPG aspects. Maybe you want to embrace that and take skills that let you reload faster so you can become a PvP-centered gunslinger. Conversely, you could avoid drawing attention entirely and spec your character into melee combat, carefully side-stepping sound traps to remain hidden while you complete your quests: “Melee weaponry is super critical to moving around the map silently and stealthily, so it’s extremely easy to play this game as a solo or duo player and really pick your battles.”

Despite a wealth of gameplay features both expected and novel to the extraction genre, Hunger is not yet ready for full release, and will be entering early access at some point in 2025. Before Good Fun Corporation’s re-brand, the studio developed the World War 2 tactical shooter Hell Let Loose, which was also an early access game, under the moniker Black Matter.

I asked if any lessons from Hell Let Loose‘s development had carried over to Hunger, and a major point of emphasis was using early access as a means to collaborate with the game’s community. “We want early access to signal that we’re trying to offer a really, really big experience here, and we know that it’s going to need some collaboration and feedback with a vibrant community to refine it and get it to the place it needs to be,” said Max.

“There’s lots of fine-tuning and nuance aspects that we really want to work on with the community,” he said, “and we think would be best worked on with the community.” Playtests seem most likely to come to Steam, where Hunger can be wishlisted. The extraction RPG seems to be shaping up nicely from what I was shown, which seems to be the intended effect: “we hope that players find a much, much, much bigger and more polished experience than they thought they would,” when Hunger enters early access.

Sources: Hunger/Steam, Hunger/YouTube