Arc Raiders is a PVPVE extraction game that released 2 weeks and a half weeks ago. It has been wildly successful peaking at 700,000+ players regularly on steam and growing in addition people playing on console.
The premise is that the ARC, killer robots, have taken control of the surface of the Earth and that remnants of humanity are forced into an underground city, scavenging on the surface to acquire gear before extracting back down underground with it. While you’re on the surface you’re hunted by a variety of flying and ground based robots while you scavenge for loot, complete quests, and if you want, kill other players. It’s lawless up top. You can kill anyone you want if you want.
But most people don’t, at least for the last two weeks. Most of the encounters I’ve been have been peaceful, even helpful. People will save you from getting killed by the ARC, team up with you, even give you items you’re looking for if they have them. There’s proximity voice chat as well as an emote system and I would say unlike 98% of multiplayer games today, the vast majority of people use their microphones.
Of course there are players who want to hunt other players and shoot anyone on sight, just playing their own deathmatch game. Some, more insidiously, will pretend to be friendly and shoot you in the back when you stop considering them a threat. This is rare and IMO extremely scummy behavior, but it happens from time to time.
I saw these 2 articles back to back on pcgamer and it amused me.
It’s pretty unique in that it creates a pretty wide variety of encounters and a lot of interesting stories. There have been several times I’ve been shot at by a hostile player, ran away, encountered other people and then tried to warn them that someone was shooting people from the direction I came. Most of the time they’ll say “well then let’s go there and kill that guy” and we form ad-hoc posses to go dispense some justice to the bandit. One time this backfired on me – I warned a bunch of people about a bandit, they all went to the rooftops of nearby buildings and took some shots and he went into hiding. I decided to close in on him by running after him and hunting him down at close range, but when the rest of the posse came to find him, they attacked me. They had only heard my voice, and not seen what my character looked like, so because I ran out ahead of the group they mistook me for the bandit and talked about dispensing justice as they murdered me. I was too confused about who was shooting at first to tell them about the mix-up until I was already almost dead.
You get knocked down upon losing all of your shields/health and slowly bleed to death while crawling. Other people can revive you if they happen to be carrying a defibrillator (or in duos and trios, your teammates). I’ve had a guy kill me, and when I started talking shit to him about what an asshole he was to kill a player who declared their intention to be friendly, he felt guilty enough to revive me. In another instance, I was fighting a large ARC robot with 3 other players. I went down and no one had a defibrilator so no one could help me. As I was bleeding to death, one of the other guys said “hey, dude, I need ammo, and you’re gonna die anyway… so, uh… thank you for your service” and finished me off so he could loot me. One of the guys I’d spontaneously teamed up with was so cool and helpful that when he died and I couldn’t revive him, I took his best gear, added him to my friends list, and gave it back to him on a subsequent run.
There are people who stalk you very stealthily and say creepy things to you like they’re some sort of serial killer but don’t actually hurt you. Some guys will kill and revive you like it’s a catch and release fishing expedition. Some people appoint themselves sheriffs, watching out for and punishing evildoers. You get a very wide range of encounters that makes the game very interesting.
The subreddit has a lot of funny / interesting clips.
The game is well made, runs well, fighting the ARC is interesting especially because the game uses a fairly sophisticated AI for the ARC that learns over time. You can shoot the engine off a quad copter or shoot a leg off a land robot and see how they struggle to adapt to stay in the fight. Flying robots will try to fly in through windows and crevices in buildings to hunt you down. Little explosive roller bots seem sometimes like they actually try to dodge my shots. I think there’s some emergent behavior in there.
The aesthetics are pretty cool in a retrofuturistic Italy, the map design is mostly pretty good with good variety, the lore makes sense. There’s some progression outside of what gear you have in that you upgrade workstations to craft better things, discover blueprints out on raids, and gain XP for a skill tree that gives your character new abilities, though most of the skill tree is pretty underwhelming. I think they wanted to reduce the power gap between older players and new players.
I’m speaking mostly of solos. You get matched up against other solo players. If you queue with a friend, you get matched with other duos, and with two friends you get matched with other trios. Solos is the most friendly of the bunch, trios tends to be a shoot on sight deathmatch, and duos is somewhere in between.
I’ve been hooked on the game since it came out. I think the best time to play is probably closer to release. When no one knows what they’re doing and the range of encounters you can have is wide and interesting. Eventually I suspect that people who generally want to be friendly will become embittered by being shot on sight too much. It’s easier to lose trust than to gain it. So they’re going to start shooting on sight, and then the game becomes more hostile, so even more people shoot on sight, until all of the cooperative gameplay just turns into a big old deathmatch. It’ll still probably be fun but not nearly as much. It’s a blast to play now. In a month or two, who knows. But that’s one of the reasons I’m playing so much now when it’s interesting.