The extraction shooter is one of the more hardcore shooter genres out there. It’s a tough genre to get into, but that could be changing soon. Multiple developers are attempting to gear their new shooters towards more casual audiences. Upcoming games like Exoborne have impressed me in that regard, but I think Steel Hunters may have the best chance at becoming a breakout hit of all of them. Steel Hunters is a new extraction shooter from Wargaming, the studio behind popular multiple games like World of Tanks, World of Airships, and World of Warships. I played its latest shooter and spoke to its Creative Director at GDC 2025.
On a surface level, the strength of the design of Steel Hunters‘ mechs, its pick-up-and-play third-person combat, and free-to-play availability could draw a lot of people in. Wargaming’s understanding of how early access and live service game development works also gives me the hope that it’ll continue to build upon the core strengths of Steel Hunters to create something special.
Go Go Steel Hunters
During a presentation at GDC 2025, Creative Director Sergey Titarenko told me that Steel Hunters falls somewhere in the middle of an extraction shooter, battle royale, and hero shooter. At release, Steel Hunters will have only one mode. It drops players on a large map in teams of two, where they can explore, gather resources, and fight an AI or human enemies that they come across. Players win if they can kill all the other teams, battle royale-style, or be the team to extract successfully at the end of the match.
None of that rocks the boat for extraction shooters too much. Where Steel Hunters stands out in the hero shooter-inspired aspect of what it lets players control. The titular hunters are all mechs, but they feel more like Zords from Power Rangers than Gundam. My favorites tended to be the anthropomorphic ones, such as the Wolf-like Fenris, bear-like Ursus, and spider-like Weaver. Each comes with a special ability, which can turn the tide in a close fight between mechs. Titarenko also explained that Wargaming intentionally set Steel Hunters on Earth so players could understand the scale of the giant machines they control.
Although I’d never played Steel Hunters prior to my GDC appointment and tend to struggle in extraction shooters, playing it on controller felt instantly natural. If you’ve ever played a hero shooter or third-person shooter before, you’ll feel right at home. That makes Steel Hunters one of the smoother on-ramps into the extraction shooter space that I’ve seen. But once Wargaming gets players into this multiplayer game, it needs them to stick around.
Titarenko outlined a few different ways that Wargaming will do this. First, players will get access to all seven available hunters and the battle pass for free at the early access launch. That should allow Steel Hunters to easily get its hooks in players. From there, new maps, modes, and hunters have the potential to arrive with each new season and give players a reason to come back. Wargaming also already held a closed alpha, from which it got a lot of feedback. From there, Titarenko explained how Wargaming is already distilling players’ requests through AI to make the necessary modifications to improve Steel Hunters.
“The challenge is to analyze this data, structure it, and make intelligent choices,” Titarenko tells Digital Trends. “This is where we use AI for analyzing player data. Once we get all the written feedback, we try to get it structured to see how many mentions of, for example, want for melee system improvements. This is where AI is really helpful because it’s impossible to do the manual work of analyzing this data and coming up with a quantitative solution and analysis. Once we understand that data and where we want to grow our game, different segments [of Wargaming] are able to make good calls and decisions about the future evolutions of things.”
While the humans at Wargaming will need to understand the community of Steel Hunters as much as these AI tools do to be successful, it’s still quite clear that the studio is ready to hit the ground running after the early access launch. And barring any launch day kurfuffles, I see the potential for Steel Hunters to attract players from day one.
Steel Hunters will enter early access on April 2 and will be free-to-play from then on.
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