Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive is venturing into new live-service territory with the upcoming release of Exterminauts, a new third-person shooter that merges the blue-collar energy of Ghostbusters with Starship Troopers. The game is already drawing comparisons to Helldivers 2, and while these are two distinctly different experiences, Behaviour Interactive is taking a page from Arrowhead’s book with how it’ll give players the opportunity to unlock Battle Passes by simply playing the game–or buying it with cash to support the studio, if you’re pressed for time.
“We should be launching with our live content, I think, about a month after [the game’s] launch,” creative director Vincent Regimbald said to GameSpot at Gamescom. “You’re not going to be stuck too long without new content. We’ll also announce it ahead of time, so people will know it’s coming up. We’re going to have some short Warbond-like Battle Passes that are going to be about six weeks long, so the cycle is going to be fairly quick, and payment is purely optional. The in-game currency you’ll be able to find, earn, and obtain through daily objectives [and] weekly objectives.”
Regimbald added that the Battle Passes will offer new cosmetics and weapons, but generally, these will be obtainable through regular play. Helldivers 2 uses a system where players can find caches of the game’s premium currency in each map, but earning enough of it to purchase the new Warbond does require you to commit a substantial number of hours to the game each month.
Mods in Exterminauts can also be earned through this route, and Regimbald said that these will shake up the default performance of weapons, unlocking wild options for players when they experiment with them.
“What they can do is give elemental damage to your shots, offer an instant reload, or give you extra critical damage on your weapon,” Regimbald explained. “Sometimes there are combinations with the gadgets that you’ve been using or the special weapons that you’ve been using. We think that players will be able to skew their build in a very particular direction depending on the mods that they select.
“There’s also what we’re calling the emblems and the badges. These are passive abilities that you can put on your character, so they can give you essentially what would look like a character class or playstyle class. You can be much more focused on gadgets, healing, or ice damage, for example. These things will affect your gameplay around that. To give you an example, if you do take the ice-focused emblem, if you freeze enemies and shoot at them, they’ll blow up and cause area-of-effect damage. There are combos that you can start to create with the mods, combined with the emblems.”
In our own hands-on time with Exterminauts, we found that the use of mods is a nice incentive to get players to stick around for another run or two. The game isn’t anything revolutionary, but its lighthearted combat and chaotic co-op could make it worth keeping an eye on. Exterminauts launches in 2027 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
