ARC Raiders Feels…Different…

Surviving Topside is a dangerous endeavor. But something is happening amongst the raiders that even I didn’t fully expect…camaraderie.

Something about ARC Raiders feels different. I know I’m not saying anything fundamentally different than what the internet is saying right now, but I still feel the urge to say, “it feels different.” I’m a recent adopter, but long time admirer, of the extraction shooter genre of games. I have been perpetually intrigued by Tarkov, but I never made my way into its harsh landscape. A few months back a group of friends and I dove headlong into Gray Zone Warfare, an open world extraction shooter made by an indie Czech outfit called Madfinger Games. A long-time fan of Tacticool games, I found Gray Zone to be an amazingly granular mixture of the gunplay of a Ready or Not or Rainbow Six and the survivalist, scavenger loop of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Game. Slow crawling an underground bunker with my kitted DDRM4, coughing silenced rounds down hallways into armored baddies and scrounging for valuables felt and feels excellent. But Gray Zone lost us a bit with its finicky AI. A few too many times we found ourselves dead at the hands of a bot with omniscient perception and Hawkeye-esque marksmanship. This isn’t an unfixable flaw, and I’m sure Madfinger is hard at work rectifying this. But ARC Raiders feels different.

Made by the, thus far, infallible Embark Studios (developers of THE FINALS), a cadre of ex-DICE developers, ARC Raiders is the newest entry to the extraction shooter genre. What started as a PvE experience, altered due to the developers feeling it lacked the “fun” they were looking for, transformed into a gritty, atmospheric PvPvE shooter with incomparable vibes. You are a Raider, as the name suggests, tasked with venturing Topside, onto the surface of an Earth overrun by ominous, hyperlethal machines called ARC. The details of the fall of society are muddy. Perhaps both the effect of prolonged time underground in the haven city of Speranza and the devs deliberate omission of key details, you aren’t really sure how things got this way. One can assume of course. But while I might catch myself wondering how these massive and unsettlingly smart machines came to rule the surface world, all of my curiosity is offset in-game by survival instinct.

Embark has threaded a precarious needle here. The lack of details serves as a flavor of the setting, rather than a detriment to the gameplay. At once, as a player, your concern with what happened before is supplanted by the importance of what is happening right now. Your run starts in a random location in any of the maps you have chosen. You get the lay of the landscape, you check you mission timer, you double check your tasks, and you get to work. The first and most obvious thing you encounter is the beautifully realized spaces Embark has created here. Dam Battlegrounds is an industrial dam surrounded by outcroppings of residential areas wrapped around a low lying red clay salt bog. The Buried City stands like a set of jagged teeth amidst the windswept dunes of some environmental disaster. The Spaceport feels like Destiny’s Cosmodrome, but instead of aliens and magic, it’s full of abandoned space age rocket hangers, detritus, and titanic structures above and below the ground. And Blue Gat, the last zone you unlock, is a sprawling, lush, low mountain security checkpoint wreathed in crumbling infrastructure. Each and every zone feels distinct and memorable. More often than I expect, I catch myself surveying some vista I have encountered and muttering something to the effect of, “fuck me this game is beautiful.” It’s mesmeric.

But ARC Raiders feels different. I have played the game for 20 hours in the first 5 days since its release and my experience, while incredibly unique for me, has been one the community at large is reporting similarly. For a game built around what, in other titles in the same genre, is a desperate and violent gameplay loop, ARC Raiders has sidestepped toxic player interaction almost entirely. In my dozens and dozens of runs, I have encountered hostile players, assuredly. But by far the majority of my experience Topside has been characterized by friendly, cooperative, or isolationist encounters with other players. Now, I will be the first to admit, I know the game is brand new, and the majority of players are just feeling everything out still. There will likely come a time where people have better gear and enter spaces with the intent of hunting other players. But as the game currently stands, everyone seems perfectly content to aid, assist, or just keep their distance from other players.

There are a few things I feel make this possible. The amount of proximity mic conversation in this game is absurd. The number of times I have entered a site, heard a player nearby, and called out over prox chat “friendly” is uncanny. What’s more, almost every single time I get a “friendly” called back in response. As long as you aren’t aggressive or stealing someone else hard fought ARC loot, players want to coexist with each other. A few days ago my squad and I decided, upon starting a run, to be hostile to anyone we saw. Get some blood on our hands, as it were. As we were traipsing up to the Village in Blue Gate we heard a squad getting their asses handed to them by a Leaper (one of the most terrifying enemy AI I have ever fought in a game). We immediately altered course to intercept them, hoping to finish off the survivors, be they ARC bot or human. But instead of sating our bloodlust, the other team inadvertently ran right at us in the woods, spotted us creeping, and called for help over prox chat. We had just decided to kill any raiders we came across on site, and yet, when the inflection point came, we dove in to aid them, felled the bounding beast, and shared the spoils. A few moments later we wished our newfound compatriots well and went our separate ways. And this is the default experience I have found.

The second, and perhaps most notable factor, is the menace and danger ARC poses at every moment. Small scuffles can turn into prolonged firefights with increasingly lethal bots at the drop of a hat. You think you have an edge on a patrol of Wasps and Hornets in one second and the next a Snitch has come to investigate the gunfire, called in additional ARC support, and your patrol has turned into a fleet of drones. And ARC has teeth. I’ve played Hunt: Showdown for years and I can tell you with confidence, the number of times I have died to ads (AI enemies) can be counted on my two hands. They are a nuisance more than anything. Rarely a true threat. But ARC is consistently capable of ruining a run. And I’ve only listed the small variants. Rocketeers are formidable foes, drifting slowly across the sky but capable of bombarding you with…well…rockets, made for bringing you low in just a couple near hits. God forbid you take one square to the body. Leapers are four-legged demon spawn, the size of a small school bus, who jump exceedingly surprising distances and heights to exact pain and misery on you and your party. Bastions and Bombardiers are six-legged hosses with brutally loud and damaging armaments. You can hear a Bastion’s minigun spin up across the map. When you do, you mutter a soft prayer for the poor souls on the receiving end. And Bombardiers fill the air with mortars the moment one of their spotter drones has eyes on you. ARC is an enemy not to be trifled with, and if you must, one you must deal with swiftly. The Queen, protector of a mission modifying event called The Harvester, is a three-story behemoth of metal. In the server slam Embark ran before launch, they reported she felled more than 108,000 raiders while she herself only met her end 77 times.

And perhaps this is the core of the issue. The core of the conceit. The core of the experience. You can’t help but feel afraid stepping through the ruins as death scans the treelines and haunts the streets. The fear prompts you to do things in a flash. The benefit of forethought is rarely afforded. You have to be liquid. Like water. Adapting to the shape of each situation on the fly. This is why players find themselves cooperating. Because in a dangerous world, having another pair of eyes and another barrel aimed down range instead of at you, is a welcome comfort. This game makes you a survivor. And surviving means doing what’s best for you and your team. Or you and your loot. When it comes down to it, the ways those questions resolve themselves lends to a more real, more filmic experience.

In the end, all of it feels deliberate. Even the absence of directed impetus. Because ARC Raiders is fully content telling you to “be safe out there.” How you define safety is forced to adapt to the systems they have put in place. Systems aligned brilliantly to push players to decide quickly. Creating emergent gameplay reminiscent of Journey’s White Robes. White Robes with guns. Allies in unexpected situations. And with the visuals, sound design, and weighted feel, each of those decisions play out in a world hungry for your footprints, and thirsty for blood. You just have to decide…whose blood it will be. And for a lot of raiders Topside, right now, the answer is nobody’s.