Why Exoprimal’s Story Failed It
Think of this as a prologue to a more general piece I have in the oven. I loved Exoprimal. I’m not super into competitive games that aren’t fighters, so when the Exoprimal beta came trotting along with its unique PvPvE structure and an assload of dinosaurs to pump damage numbers into, I was shocked to find myself pretty hooked from the start. The lack of restrictions on swapping suits, the devious machinations one could get into by ambushing the enemy team mid-dino wave, turning into a big T-Rex and wreaking havoc as what felt like an unstoppable force of nature, and all with that Capcom polish (or at least the promise of that Capcom polish) to seal the deal. I had a great time.
And when the game fully released back in July 2023, I was quite surprised to find one more little point of interest: despite lacking a single-player mode, it had an honest to god story mode. Not a tacked on little tutorial mode story, not an arcade mode, not LORE (at least, not just lore), but an actual story meant to tie into the events of your multiplayer matches, and progressed the more of them you played.
Now, let me not over-hype this. The story in Exoprimal is goofy, campy, and not especially deep. You are not going to be profoundly moved by the plot of Exoprimal. You and your paramilitary dinosaur extermination group crash land on Bikitoa Island, where a rogue AI is shown to be behind the scenes pulling the strings, and you stop him via hand-wavey time travel and science fantasy technobabble. Very pulpy, B-movie vibes full of cheesy lines and quips from a Marvel-anti’s worst nightmare. But the fact that the game’s story is directly integrated to and progressed by the 5v5 multiplayer matches puts this game alongside Bioshock 2 as rather singular entities among other multiplayer games. Even then though, Bioshock 2’s Rapture Civil War is meant to flesh out a section of history touched on by the more typically constructed single-player campaign; given that consideration, Exoprimal seems to sit alone in comparison to other competitive multiplayer games.
This was an exciting turn of events! While it’s true that cooperative games have been known to produce some good stories, this is significantly less true for competitive games. For a long time, the competitive mode of a game would be wholly detached from the narrative of the single-player, and in recent times, this has really only shifted into a focus on lore and background content. League of Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, even Apex to a slightly lesser extent, the list goes on. None of these games are especially interested in telling a story, at least not within themselves. Instead, we get tastes of concepts, enticing to the creative mind and dripping with personality (for better or worse, looking at you Concord), but not actually meaningfully utilized for the game that they are designed for. It’s why League fans are rabid for anything more than the drip feed of cool champion designs absolutely jumped on Arcane (though it helped that it was pretty good).
For Exoprimal to have decided that it actually wanted to try and tell a more traditional narrative without punting its multiplayer to the side was a rather daring choice and one that I deeply appreciated; suddenly the game had both an intrinsic AND extrinsic motivator beyond grinding for fucking cosmetics. It was a little loose sure, but the trans-dimensionally flavored B-movie narrative meant that I wasn’t playing just to have fun, but to see what kind of wacky action or melodrama the game could pull off next, assisted by relevant theming that firmly criticizes the Big Tech messiah-complex shepherded by the Elons of the present. I wouldn’t say it was what I was primarily there for, but it WAS something that I was actively intrigued to follow, if only for the novelty.
Unfortunately, it was a choice that did the game no favors. Exoprimal restricted the content within a multiplayer game based on who was the earliest in the story in your lobby. This means that if someone in your lobby hasn’t gotten to the part of the story where raids can start spawning, then this instance is guaranteed to be choosing missions from before that point in the story, meaning there’s no chance of a raid in that mission. This same concept applies to just about everything from the enemies, the maps, and even the game mode for the PvP section of the match (fucking endless DATACUBE). As a result, the launch experience for most of your multiplayer matches would’ve been the EXACT same early game mission again and again and again. Even a few months after launch, and ESPECIALLY when a new crossover event started, the game would be extremely low skill and samey consistently across your queue. This led to an extreme shrinking of the player base, and even though nowadays you can get a more varied play experience, it can be sometimes difficult to fill a lobby, and even more so to be a new player surrounded by veteran diehards. This is to say nothing of Exoprimal’s annoying monetization; the inclusion of an exceptionally grindy premium battle pass mixes poorly with a premium price tag and the aforementioned issues involving poor mission variety, turning the game into even more of a chore than it was already becoming. And with Capcom cutting off future content updates, one wonders how much longer the game will actually last.
What does Exoprimal’s failure to succeed in this endeavor mean for us then? Are narrative and competitive multiplayer two kingdoms destined to wage war for the rest of our lives? Personally, I don’t think I believe that. In my opinion, Exoprimal’s failure should be viewed less as a cautionary tale against the entwining of narrative to multiplayer, and more an opportunity to improve. To me, I think that Capcom tried too hard, and everyone else isn’t trying hard enough. Exoprimal coupled the multiplayer too tightly to the story content and strangled it; had it left some space for the true diversity of the experience to shine through, I suspect these Steamchart numbers would look a lot different than they do currently, and I think its imperative to the evolution of games as a unique story-telling medium that we further pursue this thread to see what kind of interesting narratives can be told. So I applaud the bold attempt by Capcom, scales and all, and I look forward to the next evolution in the lineage of competitive multiplayer.