Grey State Studios, the Tencent subsidiary formerly known as Aurora Studios, has been hard at work on a new horror-themed extraction shooter that makes its debut this week courtesy of story and gameplay trailers. Dubbed Rules of Engagement: The Grey State, this new title takes inspiration from Grey State’s previous work on the battle royale Ring of Elysium, but mixes modern military simulation with a unique approach to horror influences it’s calling the “horrorverse”. Rather than just adhering to one type of monster design or horror trope, Rules of Engagement: The Grey State mixes in influences from across the genre spectrum, and Grey State Studio is applying a similar methodology to its gameplay.
Along with the more commonly accepted elements of an extraction shooter, Rules of Engagement: The Grey State incorporates surprising influences from games like Path of Exile to allow players plenty of freedom with how they approach playing through its blend of PvP and PvE combat, including a novel approach to how those disparate halves of the gameplay are structured. Game Rant recently sat down with Grey State Studio’s marketing and communications lead Bo Chen, along with lead game designer Ray Fan, to discuss Rules of Engagement: The Grey State’s influences, gameplay, and what exactly the “horrorverse” concept entails. The following interview transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Taking Rules of Engagement: The Grey State From Concept to Realization
Game Rant: How did Rules of Engagement: The Grey State come about? Can you walk us through the beginning stages of the game’s development?
Fan: I think it’s fair to say that we’ve tried different directions over the past few years — different prototypes, different types of gameplay. But in the end, we feel like we eventually landed on a hybrid or new combination of gameplay, taking inspiration from multiple genres. Including the foundation of Ring of Elysium, a game that we did before, we added elements of what we call an “objective-based extraction shooter”, kind of like Hunt: Showdown, and then we added class-based RPG systems taking inspiration from games like Path of Exile, with skill trees where you can customize your build with a lot of freedom.
Then we added this Grey State lore on top of that, with the “horrorverse” concept we’ve created, and there you have it — that’s Rules of Engagement. Obviously, there have been a lot of extraction shooters that have come out in the last few years, but we are trying to do a little something different by solving a few issues or pain points in the genre, such as the “gear fear” of being crushed by players with better gear and equipment loadouts.
That’s where the idea of a level playing field, that battle royale element, really comes in handy, because everyone in this game spawns with a basic preset loadout. Everything is looted during the match, and your progression is tied to your skill tree, which, together, solves the “gear fear” issue and adds a more dynamic, random element to each match that feels more fair compared to a regular extraction shooter. So, yeah, in a nutshell, that was our thought process on making this game.
Game Rant: What were some of the primary drivers behind making a horror extraction shooter as the studio’s next game?
Chen: When we started, we had been looking at the landscape of extraction shooters and our competitors, and were seeing a lot of military simulators with a modern military aesthetic. So we started wondering, “Where are the monsters?”. We wanted to do a game where we got to build monsters, and since we were doing monsters, we asked, “Why just one kind of monster? Why not have everything? Why not have all types of monsters you can think of?”.
The original inspiration was from a movie called Cabin in the Woods, where they have this facility with all the monsters you can think of, and we just thought that was a really cool idea. And it creates almost infinite possibilities. In the future, we could do collaborations with different IPs, add different iconic monsters in the game; it just sounds like a really great idea.
How Rules of Engagement: The Grey State Aims to Stand Out From the Crowd
Game Rant: Extraction shooters continue to rise in popularity as a subgenre, but there are surprisingly few horror-themed extraction games. What were the major goals for Rules of Engagement: The Grey State’s horror elements to help it stand out further in an already limited pool?
Fan: I think one of our main goals was definitely having variety. We wanted to experiment with different types of monsters, just to see how these different types of monsters would have different impacts on how you played the game. And I think, a little bit different from games like Hunt: Showdown, for example, our monsters are designed to add more diversity and emergent gameplay elements leading to the PvP side of gameplay.
We don’t want the game to be extremely hard when it comes to PvE, because then it would just get in the way of PvP. The result of that would be that the PvP experience would be hindered by the difficulty of PvE, and that wouldn’t be a good experience. So we went about designing our monsters in two categories: there are the smaller monsters and the huge monsters.
The smaller monsters are primarily in the first phase of the match, where you’re killing monsters, you’re gathering resources, you’re trying to loot, you’re trying to gear up. They’re not designed to be incredibly difficult, but there are still rules to how you have to engage with them. The huge monsters, however…a lot of them are unkillable. Maybe there are one or two roaming around the map, and you’re trying either to avoid them or find ways to lure them into the enemy team. In principle, that’s how we went about designing our monsters and their role in the game.
Game Rant: You’ve touched on Rules of Engagement: The Grey State incorporating a wide array of horror influences, including mention of a “Horrorverse” approach to settings, enemy types, and more. Can you further define this concept of a “Horrorverse” and what it means as far as the game’s horror influences?
Chen: In the debut trailer, we’ve teased a bunch of environments and enemy types, and at the end of the trailer, we see that players are actually in Hong Kong. Right now, we’re working on a Hong Kong map with Eastern, traditional Chinese monsters. So it’s not just the Western influences. We’re trying to add a little bit of special Chinese flavor that a Western audience may not have experienced before. Our goal is to have inspiration from all around the globe. There are inorganic and futuristic monsters, we have things like Slenderman and other iconic Creepypasta monsters, and our goal is to eventually see what other kinds of monsters fit into the gameplay and then add them one by one.
Game Rant: Rules of Engagement: The Grey State wipes players’ slates clean at the beginning of each run to create a level playing field. What were some of the conversations and challenges that arose during development that led to that design choice? You mentioned that it was done to help make PvP a highlight of the experience, but were there any pain points that made the team realize that such an approach was necessary?
Chen: I think it’s mostly due to two key pillars: fairness and player choice. Fairness comes into play with how everyone starts a match with no gear, where the only real difference is that I might have a slightly different build or take on my skill tree compared to you. That emphasis on fairness is what helps contribute to a level of unpredictability that helps make us different compared to other extraction shooters.
The other pillar, player choice, is mostly highlighted in the second phase of each match, where players can choose to extract early for a safe payday, or they can go for the final prize, the Vertex, and fight for a helicopter seat. That was actually a design choice from our last game, Ring of Elysium, and was something that we felt was a very intense and fun, tactical experience that we wanted to keep. Those two things added together make the experience feel very unique, and after multiple different experiments, we just felt that was the right direction to go with.
Mixing Extraction Shooting and RPG Progression in Rules of Engagement: The Grey State
Game Rant: Promotional materials for Rules of Engagement: The Grey State make mention of it being a tactical shooter. What are some of the major influences on its first-person gunplay and combat that players could recognize?
Fan: I think, mostly, relatively fast-paced shooters. Call of Duty, for example, is something that we were drawn to because we knew we wanted to have a very fast-paced, action-packed gameplay loop with very little downtime. That style of gunplay really fits our concept. We looked at a lot of faster-paced FPS and how they handle gunplay.
Game Rant: So, from what you’re saying, on the sliding scale between something tense and tactical like Escape From Tarkov and something faster-paced and kinetic like Witchfire, Rules of Engagement: The Grey State lands closer to the latter?
Chen: Yeah.
Game Rant: How does Rules of Engagement: The Grey State handle its RPG-style progression alongside players starting each run with a “blank slate” set of gear and equipment loadouts?
Fan: I think it’s mostly two things. First is that most of the “talents”, the skills in the skill tree, are mechanics-based instead of affecting raw character power. So it’s not like having full points in the tree is going to give you 500% more damage compared to a level one player. It’s more akin to unlocking more subclasses or abilities within a particular class and trying to create a combination that fits your personal playstyle. And then some of the skill trees are designed specifically for PvE and not combat-related; things like how fast you loot, how fast you run, how fast you can kill PvE monsters, etc. A player that’s not really interested in PvP can spec into a more PvE-focused or farming-focused tree if they want.
The second part is that we’ll be using the matchmaking system to ensure that players with only a few points in their skill tree are not going to be matched with someone with a fully spec’d tree. These design decisions combined together make that balance easier to deal with.
Game Rant: How is the team thinking of approaching the release strategy for Rules of Engagement: The Grey State? Are there any plans to release the title into Early Access and collect player feedback before a full 1.0 launch?
Chen: For now, the plan is to launch the game in 2026. We’re not sure if we want to call it “Early Access”, but we definitely plan on doing at least three to four public playtests ahead of the full launch. We’re still trying to figure out the timing for those and when the first playtest would be, but we definitely plan on having multiple playtests early next year to make sure that we polish the gameplay and make sure it’s in a good state, both content-wise and gameplay design-wise.
Game Rant: Which aspects of Rules of Engagement: The Grey State are the team most excited about players getting to check out?
Fan: I think we’re definitely most curious or excited about how players take on our unique gameplay loop that combines different elements of other games to create something new. How players react to our double-phase system, our RPG elements and skill tree, the entire gameplay loop. We’re just very interested to see how players react to the gameplay so that we can know we’re on the right path. Gameplay is the number one priority for us right now, to know that we have a good foundation and something to build on.
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Rules of Engagement: The Grey State is currently in development for PC.
