Some of the most-discussed multiplayer shooter of 2026 share a lot in common. In both Arc Raiders and Marathon, you and up to two other players venture from a safe hub into hostile areas, shoot a bunch of enemies, grab a bunch of loot, and return back to safety. These games are built around a loop meant to draw players back repeatedly, and have become bona fide hits as a result. But these shooters owe a great debt to one maligned 2021 loot-shooter: Outriders.

People Can Fly’s Outriders, published by Square Enix and released on April 1, 2021 (not a joke!), wasn’t an extraction shooter, but it hit many of the same beats. You and up to two other players decamped from a hub city, venturing into hostile areas where you’d shoot a bunch of enemies and grab a bunch of loot before returning back to safety to sift through that loot, at which point you’d fine-tune your builds to do it all again. Again, Outriders was not an extraction shooter — the stakes were lower, for one, and it didn’t feature PvP — but the feedback loop scratched a similar itch as the shooters du jour.

Ostensibly, Outriders was a story-driven game. Set in the 22nd century, it focused on a contingent of humans who flee Earth for a star system some 12 light years away (at least according to number-crunching fans ). They attempt to establish a post-Earth colony, only to discover an exoplanet whose native lifeforms very much do not want humans around.

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