[News] Arc Raiders Made Me Feel Like The Main Character

Arc Raiders Made Me Feel Like The Main Character
By Mark Delaney

One of my favorite experiences in any open-world game is when something that must've been spontaneous feels scripted: when emergent moments become setpieces by happy accident. Many of my favorite games have this quality, such as State of Decay, Sea of Thieves, and PUBG. In a recent four-hour session with Arc Raiders, I saw signs that it, too, has this elusive yet irresistible trait.

For the uninitiated, Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter. What interests me about extraction shooters is that the shapes they've taken have been more varied than those of battle royale games, the subgenre du jour that preceded it. Whereas Fortnite, Warzone, and PUBG are all more or less offering the same gameplay loop in different wrappers, Wildgate is just about nothing like Hunt: Showdown, and neither of those is quite like Escape from Tarkov. What they all share is a constant risk-versus-reward calculation forever running in the back of players' minds. Knowing whether to push on for some incredible loot or to escape with more modest winnings comes down to feel; it's a gutcheck more than anything.

By now, any half-decent extraction shooter knows how to toy with this sense of risk, but Arc's art direction, audio design, and great pacing made me feel like my best rounds were the game telling my story. When I died early in my first two rounds, I was just a Redshirt, an NPC bad guy there as fodder for some other daring raider who braved the terrain's hostilities to escape with precious resources. But on the missions where my GameSpot colleagues and I traveled, fought, and scraped out wins for 20+ minutes at a time, those were our moments as the story's heroes.

The PvPvE landscape is a robust story generator, with plenty of patrolling robots seeking out those foolish enough to head above ground in the post-apocalyptic world that involves both AI and climate disasters in its story. I saw a wide range of enemy robots, including massive, intimidating walkers that reminded me of Star Wars' AT-ATs, to small, nimble drones with no weapons of their own but could call for backup in the form of three more drones with guns on them.

Malevolent machines that seemed pulled from the pages of Simon Stålenhag's books forced GameSpot's Tom Caswell and me to dodge-roll into shadowy corners or dash into open windows, waiting for patrols to pass like rebels infiltrating an Empire base. We'd trek across empty stretches of desert between major landmarks, feeling vulnerable to anyone who may be tracking us through a sniper scope, only to zipline hundreds of feet into the air and find our would-be loot haven had already been ransacked. Leaving empty-handed and with time dwindling down before we'd be stranded there, we headed back out into the oppressive sun, under which more enemies--heard and unheard--lingered nearby.

My plan is to play Arc Raiders as friendly to other squads as possible and see how much success I have.
It was as though we were trapped in the monomyth and facing down threshold guardians. In another session, in which GameSpot's Ben Janca joined us, we were making chit-chat when we were ambushed in what seemed like a well-coordinated effort by an enemy trio. It felt like the sort of rough-and-tumble action moment you'd catch in a movie, where the good guys had let their guard down and had to fight tooth and nail to get out of it merely to learn their lesson--never mind escaping with any particularly special guns, vital crafting resources to build up the base back at home, or cool tools like the absolutely must-have grappling hook. Perhaps any one of these moments doesn't sound like more than something that would be pretty neat, but when they were paced out to decorate each round, Arc Raiders became a memory-making machine, stitching together encounters that felt like they told a larger story of our triumphs and tribulations.

I've likened the game to Star Wars a few times deliberately, as the sci-fi world's blend of high-tech robots and a grease-lathered fighter pilot aesthetic very much reminds me of a more grounded Star Wars. There are no Jedi, Force powers, or lightsabers here, but if you hold Arc Raiders up to something like Rogue One or Andor, the similarities are much more apparent. As the titular raiders, player-characters feel scrappy and outgunned in all ways except their spirit. They're fast and athletic to a point, but slow-moving stamina refills remind me they're humans relying mainly on a desperate need to survive. Fighting the robots always felt like guerrilla warfare. We'd strike as opportunists, slithering out of dicey situations as soon as the risk factor clearly outweighed the reward.

That mental math is harder to solve for in a battle with other players, where variables increase exponentially as each player brings their unique play style to the skirmish. Thankfully, the game's sound design is incredible and instructive, helping me evade some battles or letting me get the drop on others. Designed by a team that includes former Battlefield developers, it's no mystery how Embark's debut game already seems to be tracking as a top-tier audio experience in video games. Far-off gunshots, nearby pings of loot caches, and the creeping, stealthy scuttle of an enemy trying to sneak up on you all come to life with immersive, layered specificity.

Whenever I play Battlefield, I wonder how it is that no other multiplayer game sounds nearly as rich or interesting. There's less chaos going on most of the time in Arc Raiders, but in terms of how much you can depend on what you're hearing when making combat or travel decisions, it's similarly masterful. Optional proximity chat (with a toggle that's easy to use even on console--a rare treat) enhances each encounter further. Will the team you run up on be friendly, hostile, or perhaps deceitful? That's for you to find out each time, much like I did in my first four hours with the game.

Each open-world map I explored had a distinct look and feel.
"We're just providing the sandbox and the tools and providing some pressure on the players and some goals for them to achieve," executive producer Aleksander Grondal told me in an interview following my hands-on time, "but we don't tell them necessarily exactly how to do it. So I think if you're a player who likes being social and wants to go out and try to make friends, the game allows you to do that and gives you ample opportunity to use your proximity voice, for instance, to say, 'Hey, I'm friendly,' you know? Whereas, if you want to try to avoid players, that's also possible to do--or if you just want to play it more as an action game, that's also possible to do. So for us, it's more about enabling the possibilities."

I noted how, in theory, if the whole community decided to lay down their arms, players could co-exist peacefully and exclusively fight against the titular ARC robots. So it seems the game plays like an intriguing, and perhaps ultimately disheartening, social experiment. Someone will always be there to mess it up for the rest of us who were willing to collaborate and co-exist. "It tells you something about human nature, doesn't it?" pondered Grondal.

Three minutes after our demo ended, the game's preview build was shut down for good, with servers coming back up when the game goes live publicly on October 30. I went into Arc Raiders knowing little about it beyond some basic facts. I came out of my four-hour session with some virtual cuts and bruises, plenty of stories to tell, and an eagerness to get back into the game as soon as possible.

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