“Don’t shoot!” I called out to the raider from a nearby bush. “I’m coming out, but I mean you no harm.”
Clearly startled by my presence and reacting based on what was more than likely a combination of the Rocketeer hovering menacingly close and a history of earlier betrayals, the dusty raider pointed his weathered Ferro rifle my way. He’d already called for the elevator to bring him back to Speranza safe and sound, so it’s no wonder that he’d be anxious. He was in danger of losing everything right at the finish line, just before those saferoom doors opened. But so was I, and he didn’t know–couldn’t know–that I hadn’t ever killed a raider before.
I could see him measuring my trustworthiness on the fly. “The robots are the bad guys, right?” I continued, sweating out the moment every second he didn’t lower his gun. “If I killed you here, you’d be the first raider I’ve shot down. I’m just trying to get home, same as you.” I kept moving so he couldn’t get a clean shot at me, but I remained hopeful it wouldn’t come to that. Before he could crunch the numbers on whether I was to be believed, the Rocketeer’s alert status started howling something fierce. It had spotted him while he’d had his sights set on me.
Not a moment later, it was firing rockets his way, sending him to his knees, clinging to life with a backpack of rare who-knows-what. I could’ve let him die. Heck, I could’ve delivered the killing blow myself if I wanted to. But I made him a promise. I tossed a lure grenade over the ridge, buying us just enough time to dash–or crawl–into the elevator as the powerful drone took off for my distraction. The raider was bleeding out, but he would make it.
“I get it, man, but like I said, the robots are the bad guys,” I reassured him. “We’re going home.”
I signaled for the rusty metal box to descend back into our subterranean safe haven. Together, this stranger and I took our wounds, loot, and survival stories back to where ARC couldn’t reach us: Speranza. I knew then that if we were to cross paths again in the post-apocalyptic world of Arc Raiders, we’d both be stronger and more trusting for it, and to me, that was more valuable than whatever he had in his backpack.
This kind of emergent player interaction is the lifeblood of Arc Raiders, a multiplayer game that rewrites its genre in remarkable ways. Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter, which means there are technically several popular games like it, but I’ve never played a game in the genre that’s as unpredictable, thrilling, and–perhaps most surprising of all–hopeful. My war story above is one of so many I’ve amassed in my 39 hours of playing Arc Raiders so far.
In Arc Raiders, the world as we know it has ended, with climate catastrophe and AI overlords combining to be the one-two punch that sends humanity living subterraneously in a civilization called Speranza. In order to better their lives and those of their community members, some citizens choose to become raiders–the daring few who return topside to scavenge for precious resources like weapons, medicines, and relics of the old world.
The gameplay loop of Arc Raiders is one built on the risk-reward analysis of every extraction shooter. Played in third-person, players will suit up in a safe space with weapons and items of their choosing, drop into a PvPvE landscape, seek out quests, resources, and challenges, and then get home safely–or die trying. The enemy robots attack on sight, while other players can choose violence themselves. When players die mid-round, they lose everything in their inventory, perhaps even to another player picking through their pockets post-mortem. It’s this worst-case scenario that has always made the genre so thrilling, but Arc Raiders takes it to amazing new heights thanks to a community that has, at least so far, mostly opted into the fantasy of its fiction.
ARC, the system of robot enemies that has claimed Earth from humanity, is everywhere, and each of the many types of ARC machines you’ll come across is impressively smart. Snitch drones will give up your location to a pack of Wasps that immediately come screeching down to Earth, ready to kill you. Duck inside a building, and they’ll peer in via different windows and angles, often finding the exact approach they need to shoot you behind your makeshift cover. Bigger machines, like the aforementioned Rocketeer drone, the Simon Stålenhag-esque Leaper, and the AT-AT-like Bastion, are so formidable that no single raider should take them on alone. Their mere image is intimidating, and their actual arsenal is much worse.
Fighting enemies in this game gives me the sense that, somehow, its enemy AI represents a leap in what’s possible in games, from a technological standpoint. Every firefight feels exciting. There are no simple, rote encounters where I easily dispatch a few robots. They always demand thoughtful planning and skillful execution; one without the other isn’t enough. When I do continue on my journey unscathed, it’s because I took careful, considered steps so I could avoid the ARC machines flying above me, rolling around at my feet, or leaping over cover to crush me. In Arc Raiders, death is easy for anyone who doesn’t choose stealth and guerrilla tactics. This meshes perfectly with the game’s story: You are outgunned and outnumbered, but the ARC threat can’t account for your uniquely human traits: perseverance and ingenuity.
I think it’s for this reason that people have largely been helpful in my dozens of hours. The world is unkind, but its people largely aren’t. Yes, you’ll encounter some ne’er-do-wells on your travels. Play long enough and you’ll be betrayed, ambushed, and robbed right down to the last metal scrap in your pocket. But much more often, you’ll find people banding together, helping each other out, and taking the fight to the true enemy. I’ve never seen an extraction shooter where players come together like they do in Arc Raiders.
Mind you, I can also see that I may be having an exceptionally friendly experience. Certainly some players have had a worse go of it than I have, including some being spawn-camped as soon as they join a round, or just players who have met more deceptive raiders more commonly than I have. Still, I find the bulk of the community is playing in a friendlier way. In my 39 hours and many matches, I’ve only been killed by another player a few times, and I’ve killed none. Though the threat of deception and ruthlessness is always present, I’ve chosen to trust my fellow raiders, and it’s almost always paid off. There are few thrills as memorable as when a game’s entire raider population joins forces and takes down an ARC Queen. Every round I play feels like a new chapter in my journey to the extent that I’ve considered buying a notebook and becoming one of those players who journals their experiences, creating a physical memento tied to an immersive, digital world.
The game’s optional proximity chat goes a long way toward creating this culture. Being able to call out to strangers sharing your space, with your real voice, and talk down potential gunfights or give them reassurances, really seems to humanize community members to one another. The robots are the bad guys. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told other players this in my time playing Arc Raiders. Usually, they agree.
The game’s quests and open world help further establish this communal aspect. When quests often give you only some basic information regarding where you need to go to complete them, you end up relying on other players for guidance. Many times in my travels, I’ve helped or been helped by other raiders because we were seeking out a particular resource or the place where we’d need to complete a quest. It gives the game’s four maps a strong sense of lived-in space. You’ll come to know places like the Buried City like the back of your hand, so when someone with good intentions asks for help, you can point them in the right direction, or perhaps even team up on the fly and work together until everyone gets home safely. Once, I came upon a roof I needed to patch, and another player was doing the same quest. We swapped stories and supplies, then wished each other luck and went about our way.
What was stopping us from killing each other to ransack the other’s backpack? In things like Escape From Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, and Vigor–three other extraction shooters I enjoy, I’d be incentivized, either by the game’s scarcity system or culture, or both, to do exactly that: Gun him down and take what was his. Arc Raiders seems to be rejecting that kind of culture so far, and it brings me closer to other players. As careful as I try to play, I’ve jumped into many a skirmish with ARC just because I heard my fellow raiders taking them on. I didn’t need to help, but I wanted to.
You can revive anyone in your group of up to three players simply by interacting when they’re knocked down, but for those outside of your formal group, you need a defibrillator. I’ve taken to carrying one or two with me in every round, and I even stash them in my “safe pocket,” which is the one inventory space that can’t be lost or looted upon death. I’ve found myself so motivated to do my part in bettering humanity’s fight against the machines that I’m actually giving this simple healing item preferential treatment over things like epic-tier keys that unlock some of the best, hard-to-reach rooms in the world. I’d rather be there for someone in need, and I get the sense this is true of many players in Arc Raiders.
Still, there are moments where PvP is more expected. This is particularly true in high-tier loot areas, like locked rooms that need rare keys to open. Even in those spaces, I’ve not yet been gunned down by another player, though the game’s Night Raids, where loot rarity and enemy density are both greatly heightened, do seem to get people reverting back to their more might-is-right instincts. In these early days, I’ve seen some content creators make a living out of playing the bad guy, and it’s clear they couldn’t possibly be the only ones in a community so large as this game is currently enjoying, so the threat is always out there and always real, but it’s been great to feel like most players are good-natured. I don’t know how much any game could really speak for the future prospects of humanity in real life, but it’s been really refreshing to see people come together in times of scarcity, strife, and a greater threat. I tend to be an optimist, and Arc Raiders feels like it’s rewarding that optimism in some way.
All of this is presented in a setting that feels something like an exciting space western. NASA-Punk attire is the fashion of the era, with raiders combining things like cowboy dusters and astronaut helmets to surprising effect. Some of these outfits look silly, but I admire them for their intended “function over fashion” aesthetic. Each of the game’s four open-world maps at launch offers a different vibe and color palette. There’s the swampy Dam Battlegrounds, the sand-drowned Buried City, the desert expanse of Spaceport, and the lush, rolling green hills of The Blue Zone.
The maps each present their own gameplay challenges. Dam Battlegrounds is something like the starter area, providing lots of cover via dense trees and shrubs, letting players get their feet wet–including literally in its swamps. Buried City offers many more interior locations to explore, as the city, submerged in sand, leaves you traversing rooftops like walkways and letting you freely duck inside most buildings. Spaceport is the most expansive and flat of the maps, leaving you more vulnerable to snipers or patrolling drones. The Blue Zone is probably my favorite of the maps so far, offering a gorgeous green valley and surrounding forests that remind me of Endor from Star Wars. From atop the outer rim of this valley, one can see most of the world from afar, and often I’ve found myself pausing to take in the scenery of our collective resistance movement pushing back against the AI threat.
Each map also feels richly decorated in history, with the world telling a collective story of humanity’s brief, temporary victory against ARC some years ago. Now, the machines are back, and exploring a world ravaged by two wars with machines like this one brings layers to the environmental storytelling. I was recently doing a quest that taught me about Husks, a gargantuan machine type that no longer exists but was more formidable than all the others combined. I wondered–maybe feared–that these would rise again in Arc Raiders one day. But I also grew hopeful at what kind of community-building taking down one of these behemoths would necessarily demand. If Husks do come back, I bet we’ll be ready to face them together.
I’ve made it this far not even touching on the actual gunplay of the game, but not for lack of its own merits: Arc Raiders is an excellent third-person shooter. The intensely smart enemies provide a consistent challenge, and careful movement patterns between things like a busted plane fuselage and a makeshift shack are key, like a guerrilla fighter attacking, then darting back into the jungle, be it concrete or natural. When things do pop off, the game’s many guns feel distinctly different and lend themselves to careful inventory management. Some guns are better for robots, piercing their armor more effectively, while others are powerful against humans, but less helpful against the ARC threat. This makes it so that each player and team always thinks about what to bring into a round. You’ll never know exactly what you’ll face in a mission, but your best guess is as reliable a starting point as any.
Reloading often takes precious time, meaning shots have to be precise. On ARC enemies, some soft auto-aim lends you a hand, but it also demands you fine-tune it when, say, an ARC drone is strafing quickly side to side. Gunplay is collectively as much mental as it is physical, as a result. For the spheroid explosive and incendiary bots, Fireballs and Pops, respectively, you have two choices: Nail your first shot or run like hell. Luckily, gunplay is polished and reliable, so you’ll always feel like it’s your own costly mistake when one sneaks up on you and you panic-fire into the ground behind them. Upgrading and modding weapons goes deep, too, with many interchangeable parts that you can move between guns, drilling down on that DIY feeling that the community in Speranza lives by.
Beyond the guns, the game has a great number of cool tools, such as a deployable zipline that has saved my life a few times, something like a dozen different kinds of grenades and explosives, a door jammer that could temporarily keep enemies (of metal or flesh) out of a space for a moment, and a high-end grappling hook item that I haven’t seen anyone use yet but was featured in my recent press preview a week before launch. Once the community starts to get their hands on this thing, the already-gone-viral game will achieve new levels of “look what I can do,” because it’s so much fun to use it.
In general, the game has a lot of tools that can have a few uses depending on how clever you want to be. One of my favorites is the manual flare. Normally, a player automatically launches a flare when another player has knocked them or when they’ve signaled for a supply drop. With a manual flare, you can make it seem like one of these things has occurred, which may either attract or ward off other players. It reminds me of the unofficial slogan of Sea of Thieves, another of my favorite games: “tools, not rules.”
This communal, DIY, guerrilla warfare aspect of the game further enhances the combat, too. Enemies tend to have specific weaknesses, but these aren’t as obvious as your typical glowing spots on a video game boss. Instead, they require experimentation and teamwork. Once, I came upon a kind raider who informed me not only of a great loot stash nearby, but also taught me how to effectively take down a Leaper by disabling it with a shock grenade, then tossing a Molotov-like bomb into a port that temporarily opens while it’s immobilized. Come upon someone who doesn’t mean you harm in Arc Raiders, and you’ll often leave with more than your life spared and some positive feelings.
While these unscripted moments are the best part of Arc Raiders, the game’s supreme audio design isn’t far behind. Brought to life in part by former Battlefield developers, it’s no wonder that Arc Raiders’ audio got to be so good. Each round tells a story that you could understand even with your eyes closed. Head into a region and you can hear raiders being spotted by Snitches atop a parking garage, a crashed ARC probe sending out echoed bleeps and bloops that sound like an alien language in the far-off sands, and a suddenly warring ARC Bastion taking on a legion of raiders who have, spoken or unspoken, banded together to take down the mechanical beast. These cues aren’t just richly layered, but also instructive. Guns deliver thunderous cracks through the air, while in quiet moments, you can listen closely to someone rummaging through loot in the room next door.
With so many of the ARC machines living above your head as drone-like bots, or in the shadows of abandoned, darkened facilities, listening for them has to be second nature, and the game’s incredible audio design provides that vital aspect. After some time in the game, you’ll learn to identify which skirmishes you hear are PvP and which are PvE based on the gunfire volleys. Arc Raiders looks gorgeous, but it sounds even better.
Arc Raiders has plans for the long haul, with a roadmap that speaks of new maps, events, and all the things you’d expect from a “living game” like this. There are also a few long-term systems already in the game, including Trials and Expeditions. Trials are akin to ranked play, though they thankfully don’t necessitate any PvP. Instead, you earn a score for completing specific active and repeatable challenges that update weekly, like dealing damage to Leapers or harvesting crops. Your scores are pitted against others in the community leaderboards, and you can climb through the ranking system to unlock cosmetics such as emotes and outfits when the timer expires. In the game’s first iteration of this that I’ve been playing with this week, I’ve found it a motivating peripheral system to the game’s more magical moments of simply living in its world and creating emergent stories with other players.
Expeditions is an even longer-tailed loop that works a bit like a prestige system, allowing you to send your character off for good, replacing them with a new one and some exclusive starting bonuses for having done so. I may be ready to jump into this system eventually, but with a level cap of 75, I feel like I have so much more to do and see before I wave goodbye to my initial, scrappy hero. Each of these systems is meant to address the community expectation of endgame content in a game that wants players to come back to the game often, though I find they’re less crucial here when so much of Arc Raiders rises above simple “content.” Arc Raiders feels cooler than that, so Trials and Expeditions feel like nice add-ons I’ll toy with, but I don’t need them to inspire me to play this game for hundreds of hours in the future.
It’s for all of these things that Arc Raiders does so brilliantly that I’m only left wanting in two relatively minor ways. For one, the character creator lacks a significant number of options, especially when it comes to hairstyles. It’s clear that more options are coming as the game goes on, as a few options are for sale in the in-game shop right now, or unlocked in the game’s battle pass system called Decks. The game needs more free options added, though, because what’s there for this massive community at launch is too restricted. For all the unique characters I’ve met playing Arc Raiders this week, there’s been too little variety in their appearance beyond the clothes they’ve worn.
Somewhat similar to that point is the hub of Speranza. Currently, traders double as quest-givers, offering their inventories and active quests in menus on demand. There’s no MMO-like hub here where players can interact with each other off-mission or explore Speranza and talk to other characters. I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is ultimately better for the game. Making the hub a collection of menus ensures players are quickly whisked through the parts of the game that unfold between rounds, but ultimately, I find this structure dampens the richness of Speranza, and keeps the hub from forming the same kind of memorable experiences that the rest of the game does so well. This simplistic hub feels like it could be a placeholder for something more elaborate someday, but, for now, it feels antithetical to the sense of community Arc Raiders is building.
In the animated menus of Speranza, listen closely to the loudspeakers and you’ll hear hints of a greater world that we can’t quite see today, though it’s one of those hints that I find emblematic of the community’s unique ethos. A woman addresses the community, reminding denizens that literacy is mandatory. I gave it pause when I first heard that. Rarely have I seen a post-apocalyptic setting with such a hopeful spirit. Here’s a community that saw its world come to an effective end, but it’s still fighting to get it back. The people of Speranza aren’t living in dystopia under a brutal dictator. It’s not dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all. They haven’t lost their humanity; they’re clinging to it. It’s the one thing ARC can’t take from them. To see the game’s community come together and, without prompting, continue in this tradition is a fascinating case of game design meeting world design by way of emergent, player-driven outcomes.
We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.
