Arc Raiders

The Game Room
1

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.

2

Is there any way to play it without PVP at all, just PVE?

3

No, there’s no PVE-only mode or anything like that. But you could play it as a stealth game with intelligent enemies (humans) if you wanted to. Do your best to roam around and get what you need done without letting anyone detect you is a normal playstyle.

4

Ah, thank you. I was more hoping for a relaxing co-op comp stomp like The Division. Doesn’t sound like that kind of game. Does seem like a great extraction shooter, though, for anyone who does like that kind of game.

5

I’ve read about this game a bit, and it sounds like something I’d either like, or really hate.

I like the idea of the proximity chat. They used to have that on the Halo multiplayer games. One time, I was in a team match, and the other team had a cheater on it, who was in some kind of God mode. This pissed off a couple of his team mates. I’m sneaking around, trying to get their flag and avoid the cheater, and suddenly an enemy Warthog vehicle pulls up on me. Naturally, I started shooting, but they shouted at me to stop, and that they wanted to help me so the cheater wouldn’t win everything. They drove me right to their base and helped me steal the flag.

One of the best random online experiences I’ve ever had, and this game sounds like it has a lot of that sort of thing.

6

The unexpected social experiences that pop up are kind of similar to the enemy turning on the hacker example you gave. Probably my favorite part of the game is community justice – a few people are in an area peacefully coexisting or helping each other, and some hostile player takes a shot at someone and everyone in the area swarms in to punish them. Of course you can get sometimes get mistake identity because you don’t see player names over their heads or anything and innocent people die, but the spirit of it is great.

I had an incident yesterday where I heard a lot of fighting in the building next to me and decided to go in to investigate. I found one player shooting a downed player. After you lose all your health, you go into a bleeding out state where you slowly lose health and die after about a minute and you can crawl around. In this situation, it’s hard to know who started the fight. Maybe the guy who is now shooting the downed player was just defending himself. Maybe they’re all hostile. But it’s hard to know for sure and I just walked into a multi-way fight with an armed guy, and so I downed him just to eliminate the threat. Then 2 more guys who were downed crawled around the corner and now I was surrounded by 4 people who were bleeding to death.

I had one defibrillator kit which could save one person, but I didn’t know which of them were hostile and which of them were peaceful people, so I told them to argue amongst themselves and make a case about who I should revive. It was kind of incoherent at first as everyone accused everyone else of being the instigator. Two of them died shortly after, and of the remaining two, one of the players said “my gear isn’t very good, revive the other guy” and I thought well he must be a pretty decent dude if he’s telling me to revive the other guy, so I revived him. Funny enough, we found another defib kit in a nearby room and revived the other guy too. Both of them followed me around like bodyguards for the rest of the match since I revived them and they were cool people.

7

So I downloaded it this week. I ran into some murderers, but some good people too. I told one guy I was a newbie, and he started giving me advice!

I’m mostly soloing right now. I did a couple of random team missions, but so far everyone just kind of took off, so there wasn’t any cooperation or planning. I’m mostly trying to avoid fighting, the sneaking around seems like my thing.

8

How does long-term progression work? If you die in a game, do you get to keep anything at all or was it all a waste of time unless you’re one of the few to extract alive?

9

There are special pockets that can save some items, but everything else is lost. But that’s not really a problem. You can get a free load out, and they don’t actually screw you on that. And so far, I haven’t really felt starved for materials to build or upgrade things. My Chicken also gives me lots of stuff to work with.

10

There are 0 to 3 safe pockets depending on your augment (combat suit) where you can keep items that you won’t lose upon death. Everyone considers this sticking things up your butt. Technically you get “knocked out” and not killed. That’s why you can keep coming back from death and retain the contents of your butt.

There’s a meta progression in that you gain skill points as you play that you can put into things like more stamina, faster breaching, more carry weight, that sort of thing. You also build and upgrade workstations which craft different sorts of items. There’s a rooster that gives you a trickle of all the basic crafting ingredients every time you go out on a mission so you’re never completely starved of material. You find blueprints which allows you to craft an item whenever you want. You also have a stash to work with – most of your runs will probably be successful depending on playstyle, so you’ll get more loot than you lose. You can use your stashed stuff to kit out your next run. And as Horatius mentioned, you can also choose to go out with a free loadout which will give you a very basic set of gear, one of the starter weapons, a light shield, a few bandages.

Worth noting, the free kit does not contain a safe pocket. When running with a free kit, one has no butthole.

I never run with free kits - I have enough spares that I can kit myself out fairly well every run, but even besides that, it’s pretty cheap to craft a very basic set of gear that’s less limited than the free loadout. A lot of people run free loadouts though and then just run around carelessly.

11

I had an interesting encounter in a game today. I was going into a pretty competitive, high loot tier area and I saw a corpse on the way in, and heard a guy rummaging around in a high value room. So when he came out of it, I shot him, figuring that he murdered the guy whose corpose I saw on the way down. And I felt bad about it, because I almost never shoot first. So I talked to the guy and he said that he didn’t kill him, and then he actually killed the guy who killed him – he told me where that corpse was and the story checked out – so I ended up reviving him. In return for being merciful to him, he gave me a valuable combat augment blueprint.

I thought to myself – well, I would’ve got that blueprint anyway if I had just killed him and looted him. And then I thought, actually, probably not – most blueprints go right up people’s butts. So I probably got something I wouldn’t have otherwise got by being nice to him.

12

Can you pull things out of their butt when they’re down but not dead?

13

No, whatever is in the butt is protected. No ad-hoc proctology skills in game. You can’t actually loot anyone until they’re knocked out, so you can’t shoot someone, look through their inventory, steal something, and then revive them.

It would go in some weird direction, I suppose, if you could put on a rubber glove and immediately start digging through someone’s butthole while they try to crawl away bleeding to death.

14

I got looted today. I was knocked out by robots, just as I was about to call an elevator to exit the level. I crawled up, made the call, but was bleeding out too fast. Some guy came up to me, and I said, “I’m dying here, man, can you help me?”

But he finished me off instead! Bastard!

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(Not a real screenshot, this item doesn’t actually exist in game.)

16

The issue of friendliness/hostility is actually quite complex in the game which is pretty unique among games I’ve played. In the first few weeks, almost everyone in solos was friendly, probably 90%+. For whatever reason, duos and trios had a culture of being more hostile. Maybe it’s because when two teams of two or three interact it only takes one person with an itchy trigger finger to start a fight and people are more cautious.

Over time it has become more hostile as one would expect. Partly because it’s easier to lose trust than to build it. If your efforts to be friendly towards people are rewarded 90% of the time, it’s easy to continue to be friendly. But what happens when instead of 10% of people are hostile, 20% or 30% are? Whereas before if you saw someone you’d probably introduce yourself in the past, you might think about just shooting the guy. Certainly if you held back to try to be friendly with someone and they took advantage of your efforts to kill you, you’ll think twice before doing that again. And then it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle - more people are hostile, so you can’t afford to be as friendly as you were, which leads to more hostility, and so on.

The other issue is that a lot of people have completed most of the objectives the game gives you. All the quests, upgrading all your work benches, getting to level 75 – at that point you have less PVE stuff to do and so you might naturally start drifting towards PVP for fun.

But even within that framework there’s significant variability in terms of helpfulness, friendliness, and hostility. As I mentioned, solos have a culture of being far more friendly than group play. But then certain maps seem much more hostile than others. And certain map conditions (like night) definitely have more hostility than their normal counterparts.

There’s also platform and geographic location. Apparently console players are far more hostile than PC players. And North American servers are much more friendly than European and Asian servers.

It’s interesting to observe. I assume the game will become more hostile over time for the reasons I outlined, but it’s possible that during the expedition (a soft reset for people who choose to start over again at level 1 with no equipment or upgrades) a lot of friendliness will come back because there’s more of an incentive to cooperate when you’re working on developing your character again.

17

Yeah, I’ve definitely seen a large range of behaviours.

I haven’t actually killed many people. I don’t want to start actively hunting people, the scrounging for resources while trying to stay alive is what I really like about the game. But I have killed in self defense a couple of times.

One case, I was part of a random trio, and the other two guys got ahead of me while I was looting. When I was trying to catch up to them, another guy popped out of hiding to ambush my guys, but he didn’t realize I was there, and he popped out right in front of me, but facing away from me. So I was able to nail him pretty easily.

The other was last night, I was doing some quest work, so I wasn’t really picking up lots of stuff, but I had a decent weapon load-out. I ran into another guy, who started acting like he was going to shoot me, so I said over the mic, “Hey, be cool man, I’m cool!”, at which point he shot me. So I lit him up, and he went down hard. As I was standing over him, I said, “Well, that’s what you get for not being cool!”

But I have had some fun random meet ups. I spawned in on Blue Gate, and as soon as I stepped out of the spawn location, I got jumped by two ARCs, so I had to duck back into the spawn building for cover. And then it just got ridiculous. People kept spawning in the same location, and the ARC just kept coming, at one point I think we had 5 people all trying to destroy these waves of ARCs that just kept showing up. We were too busy to betray each other!

Of course, a few died, so we looted them afterwards, but it was pretty crazy for a while there.

18

I think one of the big design problems with this game is that they may have made the goal of being too casual friendly. When I say this I’m not a sneering hardcore elitist trying to dunk on casual players. When you look at a game like Tarkov, which I’ve never played and only read about, it’s very casual unfriendly. There are lots of ways for experienced players to punish newer players. And I think Arc Raiders wanted to be the opposite, that experienced players would have minimal advantages over newer players.

And that’s a reasonable goal in general – certainly Tarkov is on the wrong end of that balance. But Arc Raiders may be too far to the other end. The rare, hard to craft, expensive to maintain weapons are only minimally better, if at all, than the basic starter weapons which are MUCH cheaper and easier to acquire. Heavy shields barely give you any survivability advantage over light ones. The skill tree that you fill out by playing has very minimal impacts on most aspects of playing the game. This is a design philosophy but the problem is – what’s the point of gathering rare or difficult loot for expensive gear when you’re just as good by sticking with the ubiquitous cheap gear? And since so much of the gameplay loop centers around constantly looting I think people are realizing that after they’ve finished the progression (quests, level 75) there’s no real end game. You can’t farm hard to get ingredients for great guns because the great guns aren’t any better. And super rare end game items like the legendary weapons are pretty much PVE only, and you probably never actually want to run one because you’ll probably be shot in the back by a guy with a stitcher if you ever try to take on the arc bosses.

Tarkov’s design philosophy is problematic but I think they over-corrected by going too far in the other direction. Combined with relatively small loot stashes so I feel like I can’t even afford to have a few successful looting runs in a row because I don’t have any room to store stuff, and the low value of high quality gear, it doesn’t feel like there’s that much reason to keep playing once you’ve done all of the progression content.

19

If the game has no meaningful progression, what are players trying to accomplish?

That’s always a difficult thing to balance, but it sounds like they just failed in this case.

20

But it is fun, some of the interactions are hilarious. I was playing earlier, on the Dam map, and I heard this guy with a strong Irish (I think) accent just swearing up a storm about the “Damn robots!” I had to go see what that was all about, but he was so busy bitching, he didn’t realize I was there until I was right beside him. He startled a bit, but I told him I just wanted to see what he was complaining about.

There was this giant freaking robot right in the way of where he wanted to go, he was looking for a particular item for a quest he was doing. A Matriarch, I think it was? So I was like, “Yeah, damn, that sucks dude!” I was hunting snitches myself, so I noped out of there.

Then there was another round, I came up to the elevator to extract, and I saw one guy on top of it beating another guy to death with his hammer. Dude said the guy was camping, trying to kill people extracting. A couple of other guys showed up to extract, and just as they hit the elevator button, I saw one of those snitches I’d been hunting. I managed to kill it just before we left the level. Woot!