Upcoming shooter Reaper Actual throws up some big red flags, but its creators are MMO and FPS heavyweights who can't easily be dismissed

Reaper Actual is a hard sell. It's a plain-looking modern military extraction shooter with Web3 stuff, and I've seen enough of those to know that I'd probably rather be playing Battlefield.

But the man behind Reaper Actual, former Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak head John Smedley, has snared me before: I spent a whole summer as an EverQuest halfling and did a few tours in the sci-fi MMO wars of the PlanetSide series.

Smedley has again teamed up with PlanetSide 2 creative director Matt Higby and PlanetSide 2 senior art director Trammel Isaac (who also made art for the original Fallout games) for this game. After an hour-long call with Smedley about his "dream game," I'm not totally sold, but I've at least been convinced to give Reaper Actual a shot.

The red flags

My ears particularly perked up at the mention of Rainbow Six Siege, as I didn't expect close-quarters base defense to be a focus in a persistent, open-world MMO shooter. You might even be able to make a home out of, and defend, a beached cruise ship or a submarine (they're "talking about" those possible bases), and you won't need a crypto wallet to do it.

The NFT stuff is all optional, and absent from the Steam and Epic Games Store versions of Reaper Actual, Smedley told me. He's pitching blockchain trading as no different from the Steam Community Market, which Reaper Actual will also support, and says he understands the skepticism around crypto and hates labels like "play to earn."

So why do Web3 at all?

"I actually went out with no intention of Web3," Smedley said, "and I couldn't get funding to make this dream game that's been in my head for 10 years."

That's just how it is these days, perhaps: Get a little blockchain in there if you want to fund your project. But I'm not turned off by Web3 games just because I don't feel like setting up a crypto wallet. What makes me wary is that they imply a game that's oriented toward grinding for rare items, with strict controls on how much fun you get to have so that you don't break the economy. Smedley says that Reaper Actual's design hasn't been negatively influenced by Web3.

"When it comes to making money off of games, I believe in one thing over everything else: The game has to come first," Smedley said. "And that's the only thing that matters in the end, because if the game sucks, who cares about your Web3 aspects or anything else?"

He's saying the right things, but even putting aside the specter of speculative trading, Reaper Actual has a lot of convincing to do. Next to PlanetSide 2's colorful sci-fi world, which recalls the Tribes series, Halo, and Starship Troopers, Reaper Actual's cast of spec-ops archetypes (beard guy, bigger beard guy, wetsuit woman) don't impress me, and its fictional island looks like it could appear in any modern shooter.

Another red flag is the AI disclaimer on Reaper Actual's Steam page. Smedley tells me that generative AI is only being used to help give flavor to side missions players will pick up as they grind XP, which would be prohibitively time consuming to do entirely by hand.

The fun stuff

I'm not entirely convinced by that justification—finding a way not to include filler missions seems preferrable to resorting to the word machine—but otherwise, Reaper Actual's premise does sound fun.

You're a mercenary on an island covered with warring NPC factions, and taking jobs from them will see you fighting the other factions, and possibly other players who picked up opposing contracts. Like in Tarkov, the stuff you're carrying is forfeited to looters if you die, though you can try to recover it out in the persistent world.

"If I have a helicopter, for example, I could drop in close to where I was and go look for the guy [who has my loot]," Smedley told me.

Player housing adds that Rainbow Six Siege wrinkle: Each player will own at least one home base, and if you build up too much "heat" (as in GTA's police attention meter) on missions, your base can be raided by other players. They'll loot your war spoils unless you stop them with the help of traps and spare Reapers—the operators you play as, who become AI defenders when not in your direct control.

You'll get one base free, but you'll have to use in-game currency or real money to acquire fancier ones. The in-game currency route won't require a "crazy grind," Smedley says, but that's another see-it-believe-it thing.

A base might be a warehouse, a mansion, an apartment in the city (the largest FPS city ever, Smedley claims), a shack out in the boonies, or for the real high-rollers, "we're talking about doing a submarine base and a washed-up cruise ship base," Smedley says.

You might need help to afford a base that big, and players will be able to band together in outfits with pooled resources.

"Our largest bases will be able to fit 100 defenders versus 100 attackers," says Smedley. He's a fan of EVE Online and its massive wars, which also inspired aspects of the PlanetSide games. In that vein, you'll also use your base for crafting, and there's an MMORPG style economy.

Regarding the shooting itself, Smedley says gun crafting and tweaking is going to go deep, and they're targeting something similar to Call of Duty: DMZ overall.

"I mention DMZ specifically because of the time-to-kill," he told me. "It's very close to Tarkov. We are a slower-paced game, that's very deliberate, and we put DMZ as sort of our bar."

Placing their bet

Reaper Actual sounds cool on paper: 200-player base sieges and you can chase people down with helicopters in a giant city? Sure, I'll give it a spin.

But lots of shooters come around claiming to be the next big thing, and I've yet to like one that was born of crypto capital. (One look at the tackiness of Off the Grid was enough to put me off it.) So for now, Smedley's experience and frankness are doing the heavy lifting to make Reaper Actual appealing.

"We are placing our bet that we are giving players something that they don't know they want," Smedley told me. "That is our bet, and this is making games. I've made them for 36 years, and some have succeeded great, and some have failed miserably. It wouldn't be fun making it if there wasn't risk."

There's more info in the FAQ on Reaper Actual's official site. A release date hasn't been announced, but it's wishlistable on Steam and that'll get you a notification when it's time for the first public playtests.