Checking in with ‘ARC Raiders' and its Unique Community
When I fired up ARC Raiders for the first time about a month ago, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew Embark Studios’ extraction shooter had been well-received at launch, and I’d heard about its friendly community within a genre not known for being welcoming. That was the source of my curiosity, seeing how someone getting into the game now, with little advanced knowledge and no real clue about how it should be played would find the experience.
My first run failed, killed by the titular robots. My second run ended just a couple of minutes after it started when I was shot in the back and killed by another raider. I began to find my footing a little after that, but across my first few hours with the game I didn’t understand why it’d garnered such enthusiasm. My gear was weak, most things could kill me, and progress felt glacial.
Things really started to improve when I began to team up with people, whether officially by launching into three-person runs or unofficially, when individual players would simply come together to accomplish things. That I wasn’t doing much didn’t seem to matter to anyone. Most of my interactions were friendly, and in hindsight that’s likely because the game funnels its players into different types of lobbies based on in-game behavior.
Aggressive players, those who are likely to shoot their fellow raiders on sight, find themselves in PvP (player vs. player) lobbies—initially, I had no established identity, which is why many of my deaths at the hands of other players came in early solo and later duo runs. Meanwhile, those focused on fighting ARC robots and helping others land in PvE (player vs. environment) servers.
It’s a smart system, ensuring that ARC Raiders’ player base finds the experience it wants, rather than forcing a particular style on everyone. Personally, I gravitated toward the PvE side because it delivered something wholly different from other online games that I spend my time with—most notably Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Those titles gave me all the competitive shooting action I need, and it made ARC Raiders a breath of fresh air.
Given that the game has been out for more than four months now, I won’t spend much time breaking down the systems, but for the uninitiated, ARC Raiders is a third-person, PvPvE (player vs. player vs. environment) extraction shooter that drops you into one of five maps and gives you 30 minutes to get in, do what you want, and get out at designated extraction points.
While there are light story-based elements with NPCs that hand out missions for you to complete, loot is the game’s lifeblood. You head to the surface in search of blueprints to build new items, trinkets to sell, the raw materials needed to make guns, shields, ammo, and more, to defeat the ARC machines that patrol. Successfully exfil and you’ll take everything back to the underground city of Speranza. Die and you lose everything you’re carrying.
That risk-reward element gives stakes to every run, and it leads to moments, both good and bad, that create memories that, even as I type this, come flooding back. There was a time I walked into the extraction elevator to end my run only to have an unscrupulous raider drop me with a shotgun, a practice known as “ratting.” Another time the door was literally closing on my successful exfil when a well-placed projectile from an ARC Rocketeer exploded and launched me out of the elevator, dooming my run. The latter was met with howling laughter from me and my team. Sure, I lost my payload, but it happened in hilarious fashion.
For every failure, there are success stories of taking down an ARC when my shield was gone and life whittled to nearly nothing or literally crawling while DBNO (down, but not out) just before the elevator doors close and escaping with that precious loot. ARC Raiders is as adept as any game I’ve played in years at making moments, and it’s what separates it from other online titles for me.
Another area that ARC Raiders excels is in making it feel like you’re progressing no matter how a particular run plays out. That’s done by having any experience you earn, whether by killing ARCs/other raiders or simply searching for loot, be retained regardless of outcome. So, you may lose your gear, but the XP is banked as you level up and progress along the skill tree.
A free loadout is always available as well, allowing you to essentially take risk-free trips to the surface to try and refill your coffers. Eventually, you’re sure to have a vault teeming to the gills with an assortment of weapons, gear, and raw materials. NPC shopkeepers also accept various currencies earned from a variety of activities that further help ensure that you never become hopeless. It’s a well-designed system that rewards playing the game. Yes, there is a system to use real money on Raider Coins, but they’re purely for cosmetics.
Eventually, the fear of those early runs, or perhaps more accurately those runs when you first start to risk decent gear, dissipates as you’re carrying stronger weapons to deal with enemies and have enough stuff to weather your failures. That doesn’t mean the game becomes easy, though. Even a seasoned raider can get overrun by ARC, and there are daily challenges within each map to up the difficulty, such as night raids or hurricanes, in exchange for the promise of better loot—and better loot draws out rats.
If you ever get bored of one style of play, all you need to do is embrace the opposite side to get moved into the other servers. Shoot a few raiders and you’ll find yourself in PvP territory for a more combative experience. Or use a free loadout, run around and get killed by other raiders without fighting back, and you’re sure to be back in the mellower PvE zones.
Embark Studios has crafted an excellent game, one that feels both approachable for newcomers and sustainable for veterans. I put dozens of hours into ARC Raiders to write this column, and I’ll doubtless spend dozens more. Part of the reason is an exceptionally well-crafted game, but perhaps a bigger reason is the community of players who are largely helpful and seem to be genuinely enjoying their time in the world of ARC Raiders.
If you’ve considered taking the plunge but were worried about barriers to entry, I’m here to tell you that whether you want to play in groups or just do solo runs, this is as welcoming a community as I’ve found in years.
I’ll see you on the surface, raider.