I was hanging on for dear life this weekend. I spent about 13 hours in Arc Raiders’ “Server Slam,” a test of the game’s servers and overall game stability ahead of its release on October 30, and it’s clear that the game clicked with me so well, I might hardly leave my apartment anymore. Farewell social life and other hobbies; Arc Raiders is nearly here and I don’t know if I can resist its call.
A PvPvE extraction shooter, Arc Raiders makes for a rough experience, but also a thrilling one. It is also, clearly, the multiplayer game I’ve been searching for ever since it was announced that Call of Duty’s DMZ was headed for a slow, un-updated death. So allow me to tell you of the unbelievable thrill that was Arc Raiders this weekend.
Arc Raiders is a hostile game. That’s the point
There’s no way around this: Extraction shooters are just mean. And Arc Raiders is nasty.
The lone map provided during the Server Slam was replete with hiding spots from which you could plan an ambush. Though you can’t lay prone, it’s pretty easy to hide in bushes, and the interiors of buildings have their fair share of corners you can exploit. Survival is about keeping your head on a swivel and your ears perpetually open for random sounds that can signal the presence of a threat before you can see it.
Arc Raiders, like many other extraction shooters, sticks you right in the midst of a fight-or-flight response and exploits that tension for a one-of-a-kind dopamine rush if you make it out alive, and one hell of a come-down should you fail. No, it’s not fun when you lose all your shit from a kill you could never see coming; yet somehow you need to push past that to find “fun.” It’s not for everyone.
Arc Raiders is mean in a way that a simple battle royale or team deathmatch just isn’t. You can die so quickly and, true to the genre’s conventions, death puts you at risk of losing your best gear. It often doesn’t feel fair; that’s a tough pill to swallow. Don’t worry, though; plenty of mean people will eventually get what they deserve in a later round when they inevitably push their luck too far. That’s just what this game is about: The deep, crushing feeling of loss is why the feeling of winning is so exhilarating. The highs are so high because of the depths of the lows.
This is what I love about the PvPvE extraction genre: Everything matters and punishment is swift. The distant clap of gunfire isn’t set design, it’s an actual firefight that could quickly become your problem if you’re too close. You can hear nearby enemy players break into various loot caches, digging around for supplies, and that becomes a signal that you need to either GTFO or draw your weapon and be prepared. Enemy Arc drones and other machines are an essential part of this experience: They’re an opportunity for good loot, an engaging gun battle, or the best distraction in the world from enemy players who have you outgunned. The PvPvE is a triangle you rotate around.
Fleeing battles during the Server Slam was sometimes as exhilarating as participating in them. The experience of trading shots with enemy players down long corridors of an abandoned water treatment facility, only to need to race down the labyrinthine maze of hallways, tossing smoke grenades behind me and barely making it to a door I can shut, giving me a precious few seconds to heal up and continue my escape or make a stand taps into something so exhilaratingly primal in my brain that even thinking about it makes my skin tingle a bit.
Perhaps because it’s October and I’ve been on a huge survival horror kick in general, it dawned on me that extraction shooters and horror games seem to poke at the same network of neurons in the human brain. Seeing another player can be a jumpscare; hell, the game’s tumbleweeds and random bits of garbage that float around as set design often trigger a kind of PTSD response as, in order to survive, you do have to sort of assume anything that moves is a potential threat. I’ve shot a few tumbleweeds impulsively because surviving in this game means you have to close that distance between seeing a moving thing and shooting it.
And when things break out into full-on firefights with either human players or the game’s machines, it’s a spontaneous game of survival unlike anything else, given the real risk of dying and not respawning, losing your weapons and essential crafting loot. It’s a challenge to not let the lethality of the game consume you and turn your next run into a rage-filled revenge quest. The game is aware of this, as one of the post-death loading screens literally says “This could be an excellent start to your villain arc.”
As one Redditor commented after suffering a humiliating betrayal by another player:
I will never trust a raider again. It’s dog eat dog out there, and now this dog is hungry.
“Sure,” one Redditor replied, “it wasn’t a happy ending, but it’s a far more unique experience.” The risk of betrayal, the tender nature of any temporary alliance, the risk and reward, it’s what makes this whole thing so damn entertaining. Success is in rare supply, so you are regularly chasing it.
Fighting other humans is a ton of brutal, mean fun. But I was very surprised to find the game’s computer-controlled enemies, the E of the PvPvE triangle, were also great sparring partners and, interestingly, helpful informants.
Against all odds, Arc Raiders has flying enemies that don’t suck
Arc Raiders didn’t set out to be a PvPvE game at first, we’ve learned. Other human players were added after developer Embark realized that simply fighting the game’s robots, collectively referred to as “Arc,” over and over again got old too fast. And while I probably wouldn’t want to just play a game that pits me against these machines without human antagonistic forces, damn are they enjoyable pests to have roaming the skies.
Read More: Arc Raiders’ 2-Year Delay Explained: Game Was Boring
Upon stepping out into the game’s post-apocalyptic maps, you’ll regularly see drones flying out in the distance, always keeping an eye on what’s going on underneath them. They come in a few varieties: drones with guns, drones that can summon other drones with guns, and of course the big ones that shoot rockets at you and are a literal terror. They’re deadly, sure, but their presence can also indicate where other players are, which is essential knowledge for survival. Arc drone behavior, whether they’re actively engaged in a firefight with other players or are searching for players they’ve caught sight of, sends a clear message: Either there’s a situation up ahead that you want to avoid or there’s a possible opportunity that you want to exploit. After all, looting a downed player is likely to net you a healthy injection of supplies and a decent chance to find a good weapon.
Drones let you know what you’re potentially getting yourself into while you’re traversing the map. They also make for unlikely temporary allies. On more than one occasion, I fired off shots at drones to lure them to my position to try and shake off some enemy players who were on my tail. Arc can rapidly change the dynamics of a firefight between players as they swiftly dart through the air and ignore the ground-level cover that players are hiding behind.
And it seems much of the community shares my fondness for these airborne pests. Thank the goddess.
One of the most up-voted threads, sitting just shy of 5k up arrows, on r/ArcRaiders is a plea to not nerf Arc following the Server Slam. Arc’s lethality is the point, others have argued, and they’re right.
Drones also offer a surprisingly fun test of marksmanship. They’re not just flying things for you to mindlessly pump bullets into for the sake of loot and experience points. You really have to place your shots well to come out alive. Shooting out the propellers on these machines can ground them faster than aiming at the core fuselage, but it also makes their flying behavior wildly erratic when a propeller or two is destroyed. Landing shots on them is as satisfying as nailing a clay pigeon in real life–something I haven’t done since I was a kid, yet Arc Raiders tapped right into that old muscle memory. To top it off, drones carry pretty decent crafting supplies, so there’s good reason to fuck with them if you’re confident you can earn their loot unscathed.
Thanks to all the ways they make the action more dynamic, these airborne pests never frustrated me the way flying enemies in games usually do. They’re useful for dealing with other players and somehow exist in this Goldilocks zone of being a lethal challenge that’s surprisingly fun to take down.
Will Arc Raiders shatter the extraction shooter’s glass ceiling?
Extraction shooters have struggled to hit critical mass in the way that, say, battle royales have. At their most intense–when they incorporate rigid survival mechanics like hunger and thirst, deadly fall damage, and the need to keep track of specific calibers of ammo like you do in, say, Escape From Tarkov–they’re just too grueling to ever appeal to a mass audience.
Arc Raiders streamlines many of the genre’s survival trappings: There’s no hunger or thirst. You can move pretty fast for a “realistic” game and can survive some pretty steep falls if you jump off a ledge. And ammo is abstracted down to light, medium, heavy, and shotgun (at least as far as what was on offer in the Server Slam). It’s an easier game than many of its more hardcore peers, but it’s still punishing.
The Server Slam also capped out at a certain level. The game has skill trees that you invest points into to up your survival skills, improving everything from how long you can sprint, to how quickly you can vault over objects, to how much noise you make while rummaging through the detritus of a fallen civilization.
Given the level cap of 15 in the Server Slam, this weekend saw the intensity only ratchet up to a certain point. Once players have the full game, I wonder how chaotic, or potentially unfair, some builds will be, and at what point Arc Raiders may struggle to sustain that Goldilocks zone of tension. The game could also use some more QOL features such as double or triple key bindings and maybe some better inventory management tools.
Still, I haven’t been this optimistic about a multiplayer game all year and I’m hungering for this game to return in a way that worries me. When the servers went dark last night, I was quite sad.
So if you don’t see me in real space after October 30 when this game launches, don’t be surprised. This game is going to be a problem for me, and I’m so here for it.
