PC Game Concept · Extraction Shooter · 2026-09-28

Cutline

A demolition crew is taking a hyperscale tower apart floor by floor for its rare-earth bones, and the only way in is to outrun the same public countdown every other crew can hear too.

Extraction Shooter PC (Windows) Keyboard & Mouse / Controller Free-to-Play + Season Pass
Cutline key art — a salvager stands on an exposed girder at the torn-open edge of a half-demolished skyscraper, looking out over a hazy city at dusk
Who It's For
The Target Player

Someone with fifty hours in ARC Raiders or Marathon who's good at the genre and tired anyway — tired of sprinting the last two hundred meters to a landing zone only to eat a shotgun blast from someone who's been lying in the grass outside it for ten minutes. They want the loot-and-live tension. They just want the exit to be a race, not a known camera angle.

The Gap It Fills

Players who bounced off Tarkov-style all-or-nothing loss but loved what Escape from Duckov proved: a lower-stakes, PvE-first entry point can still be a real extraction shooter. Cutline pairs that on-ramp with full PvP stakes for players who want them, in the same tower.

Core Loop
The 30 Seconds

Strip a condemned floor for salvage while a broadcast demolition countdown ticks toward the charge under your feet, then gamble on reaching whichever stairwell or shaft the collapse hasn't sealed yet. Everyone in the tower hears the same warning at the same time.

The 30 Minutes

Clear three floors tracking two numbers: the public burn schedule and the independent structural decay under your boots. Cut a beam to seal a rival crew's route. Call your cage, lose the fight for its three seats, and rappel down the tower's face to call a second one.

Key Systems
PUBLIC BURN SCHEDULE
A PA countdown broadcast to every player in the tower, naming the next floor sector and the time to detonation. No private timers — the tension is what everyone does with the same information.
NO FIXED EXTRACTION
The cage travels to whichever shaft is structurally intact when it arrives. There is no landing pad to memorize and camp, and rival crews can beat you to a cage you called.
INDEPENDENT STRUCTURAL DECAY
Beyond the scheduled charges, every floor has its own integrity value that drops from gunfights and nearby collapses. A floor can go early if enough happens on it.
STRUCTURAL SABOTAGE
Cut a support beam to drop a floor section on command — seal a stairwell behind you or take a pursuing crew's route out from under them.
VERTICAL TRAVERSAL KIT
Grapple across gaps, rappel down the tower's exterior, climb collapsed sections. A sealed stairwell is an obstacle, not a dead run.
DEAD-DROP CACHING
Weld a partial cache mid-run. It survives your death and can be retrieved later in the same raid, or lost to whoever finds it first — a middle ground between full loss and full safety.
RECLAMATION LEDGER
One corporate progression track, not a faction web. Turning in salvage by category raises your access tier and opens floors deeper in the tower before the demolition front reaches them.
Key Features
# No extraction point ever stays put — the cage arrives wherever the shaft survives, killing the camped landing zone at the root instead of patching it
# A public, shared demolition countdown — every player hears the same warning at the same time, turning private-timer tension into a race over shared information
# The map is a countdown too — floors demolished this week are gone for the whole season, for every player, permanently
# Dead-drop caching turns permanent loss into a graduated risk instead of an all-or-nothing gamble on a stranger finding your body first
# Structural sabotage as a tactical tool — drop a floor on command to seal a route or deny a rival crew's shaft access
# A single Reclamation Ledger progression track instead of a faction web, tied directly to the tower's own countdown
# A genuinely complete solo/duo PvE mode from day one, not a stopgap patched in after launch
What Sets It Apart
01 // NO CAMPED EXIT
The cage arrives wherever the shaft survives, which removes the single most-repeated complaint in ARC Raiders' own community right now by making a fixed camera angle impossible to establish.
02 // A PUBLIC CLOCK
Every player in the tower hears the same PA warning at the same time — the fight is over what everyone does with information nobody had to earn.
03 // THE MAP SPENDS ITSELF
Most extraction shooters rotate a fixed map pool. This one spends its map, permanently, and doesn't get it back until the season resets.
04 // GRADUATED LOSS
Dead-drop caching answers the genre's harshest criticism — losing everything to a stranger — with a real middle ground instead of a difficulty toggle.
6-Week Prototype Plan
Week
1
Vertical Movement
Climbing, grapple-crossing, rappelling, and the feel of a floor shuddering underfoot. No combat, no loot — movement has to feel right before anything else is added.
Week
2
The Burn Schedule
A three-floor graybox with the public countdown system running live, basic loot placement, and a first pass on structural decay from gunfire.
Week
3
Threats & Sabotage
AI salvagers, the structural sabotage tool with a verified-alternate-route constraint, and the alternate-route layout pattern the traversal kit needs to matter.
Week
4
The Cage
Extraction call-in with travel time, a shaft-survival check against the current burn state, three-seat capacity, and contest behavior when two crews call it at once.
Week
5
Ledger & Network
Dead-drop caching, Reclamation Ledger currency and access-tier gating, and an 8-player network test of the full raid loop end to end.
Week
6
Vertical Slice
A 12-player playtest across a floor bank with one live scripted burn event mid-session; tune timing and cage contest frequency against real data before a stakeholder build.