I’m sitting inside a small storage room, neighbouring an elevator that’ll whisk me to safety and a massive payday. I’m cranking open one last storage locker before I head home, then bam: disaster. Another player sprints towards my location with murder in their heart and a bullet in the chamber. I turn around just as the door opens and we trade fire, each heavily injured and ducking behind cover.
At this point, something strange happens: We start chatting. I suggest we cease hostilities and my enemy reveals himself to be a younger British guy. He says no, and throws a grenade at me: negotiations are not going well. I close the door and slap a Door Blocker on it, sealing it from my side. Clueless, this guy tries again to push me, only to find his passage inside unsurmountable, meanwhile I’m healed up and ready for the counter attack.
This is one example of a tense bit of player-vs-player action I experienced over the weekend playing Arc Raiders during its server slam. It’s an exceptional anecdote, sure. Most encounters with other players were quick blasts of gunfire, ending with a sharp punch to the jaw, but you’ll be shocked at how much this social aspect adds to the game. I’d argue it’s core to the whole package.
Allow me to explain why. The extraction shooter genre is, to summarise its tone, a series of suffering simulators. They are by design unforgiving, harsh games to play. All your best loot can be taken on a challenging run, and with the wrong turn towards a better player, the vast majority of these hard-fought gains can be lost in a second. As such, your character’s life is one of survival at any costs, a bristling existence where you’ve got to watch your own back and do what you need to do.
But if you do risk it, if you press the push-to-talk key or spam “don’t shoot” on the emote wheel, you open up the possibility of short-lived friendships. After all, if your inventory is full and their inventory is full, even if you get the best of them you’ll leave with what? Some extra bullets and a toaster? Maybe if you’re lucky a blueprint you don’t have?
I believe the spirit of co-operation is alive and well in Arc Raiders, and have seen it work out brilliantly. I’ve managed to extract successfully from a match with three random players without a shot fired, all thanks to a bit of verbal reassurance and faith in my fellow man. It’s also gone poorly for me; I’ve been roaming around with a friend for three minutes before he shot me in the back, apologising before knocking me out and stealing my stuff. I’ve had my head blown off by a true villain, who spammed “don’t shoot” to get my guard down, then murdered me at the earliest opportunity.
Now, you may be thinking, “Arc Raiders didn’t invent push-to-talk, dummy, other games have this,” and you’re right. Thankfully, Embark Studios has seemingly tailored even the smallest interactions between yourself and the world to encourage these PvP encounters. The secret trick? Noise – and a lot of it. Almost everything worth doing in Arc Raiders makes noise: Opening doors, breaking open boxes, running literally anywhere, shooting your gun, summoning an elevator to safety, doing a sick roll across the ground five times in a row. Everything generates noise that can be heard from a distance – the map filled with players all slowly moving around and listening out for each other, weapons at the ready.
What this means is that PvP-oriented players take the role of a hunter, stalking the wilderness and picking off players they come across. But maybe you’re not keen on PvP, maybe you’re a scavenger. I certainly am! Rather than separate myself from the players around me, through doing my thing and looting to my heart’s content, I am acting as a loud clarion call for other people. This is great – it naturally encourages interaction between players with different goals.
There’s this one spot I love. On the Dam Battlegrounds there is, obviously, the big dam at the centre of the map. Near this central point is the Control Tower, where lots of amazing loot can be found. But just next to that over the dam itself is a series of bridges you have to manually drop. These connect not only the control tower to the rest of the dam, but allow access to two very lucrative rooms full of loot. There are even some security lockers inside that only those who drop loads of skill points into the Survival skill tree can open.
Accessing this place requires time, and a lot of noise. You’re naturally attracting the PvP players next door to your location, at which point you’re stuck hanging over a massive drop to the floor below with only a coverless bridge between you and the attacking player. This could be a devastating battle, or, it could be time to bust the microphone open and talk things out. This happened to me, and it was brilliant.
The server slam was only a small slice of the whole game, but judging Arc Raiders by this little offering has me frankly desperate to jump back into the full game. If you have any love in your heart for online hijinks, for making desperate friends and the sting of betrayal, then Arc Raiders has that in droves. It’s nestled inside what appears to be a truly well-made extraction game too, one that sets the bar high for its competitors.
