Fragmentary Order

Cor3

At this point, it seems like the new battle royale, which was the new arena shooter, is now the extraction shooter, the PvP, PvE or PvPvE concept of loading into a map, killing things, getting loot, and extracting without being killed yourself. Now, there’s a new player on that field in the form of Fragmentary Order. We think. Maybe. This whole thing is very weird.

Fragmentary Order, already being called “Starkov” by many, debuted a seven-minute cinematic trailer yesterday, dropping from new studio Rant Gaming and publisher Cor3, the latter of which is also the name of the villainous corporation in the game. They are both new to the market and, according to a Gamesbeat piece, “coming out of stealth [and] not revealing who is behind those entities yet.” Uh, strange.

There was early speculation that this was a new game from the Tarkov creator/studio, forcing the head of Battlestate Games, Nikita Buyanov, to say that this has nothing to do with either Battlestate or Tarkov. Though he also…said that yesterday was a “special day” and retweeted the game’s trailer. So no one really knows what’s going on.

The word “extraction” is not uttered aloud, but the creators say “death is a cost and risk is an investment,” implying those mechanics. And reading a description of the game, you would say it sure sounds a lot like another recent extraction entry. In Fragmentary Order, you’re in a sci-fi interplanetary setting where you as a player work with a corporation to remote control combat clones on the hunt for biomechanical upgrades. Replace “clones” with “robots,” and you have the concept of Bungie’s Marathon, which released early last month.

Very quickly, you will see that this is essentially the anti-Marathon in tone and aesthetic, however. No bright colors or hyper-stylized aesthetic. Gritty and more gritty, a much more traditional shooter look for better or worse. The trailer jumps around quite a bit from some sort of apocalyptic Soviet accident in the ’80s to corporation Core rebuilding the world and making VR headsets, to eventually leaving the planet and now fighting wars against a resistance of some sort. I thought I saw an alien ship in there too, for a second. This is, of course, reminiscent of UESC versus MIDA in Marathon, and if those are aliens as a third party, well, it has that too.

Participating in early Fragmentary Order tests involves going to the website, cor3.gg, and completing a bunch of odd, meta tasks to get onboard and get selected. This whole thing is very strange, but unique, I suppose.

There are some rumblings that this may have something to do with web3/the blockchain, which would certainly be eyebrow-raising considering how widely disliked and immensely unpopular those are in mainstream gaming, but that remains unconfirmed.

I’ll say this, they’ve certainly gotten my attention to see exactly what’s going on here.

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