It is my deep regret to inform you that while being in an evil genre of a game and developed by a company with evil business practices (paying a one-time fee to voice actors to allow AI to create new content using their likeness in the future, which one, their excuse of oh maybe the actors won’t be available in the future is horseshit, somehow everybody else has figured out how to deal with that one and also, voice actors = generally available and two, it sounds like shit), that ARC Raiders is actually pretty good.
Mostly it’s that they’ve nailed the moment-to-moment gameplay. Like any good action game, it is fun just to traverse the levels and fire the weapons, while also having enough variety of approaches that it accounts for various playstyles, you can hide and snipe, you can use terrain/smoke grenades/distractions to push players, you can set devious traps, you can use utility to be incredibly maneuverable or create/destroy advantages in PvP encounters, and so on.
Maybe the most intriguing design principle is that the game is full of false sensory indicators – the most obvious one are tumbleweeds that move around the outside levels in such a way as to mimic how another player would move if you saw it in your peripheral vision or if it was partially obscured at distance. The less obvious one is in the sound design, where in-game there is layered music, ambient sound fx, and “actual” audio – footsteps and other sounds generated by characters moving around and doing other actions, as well as proximity chat. The “trick” is that the ambient layer contains very faint and incomplete sounds that plausibly could be “actual” audio, so absolutely a parallel to the tumbleweeds, a structure similar enough to dangerous activity that it forces you to constantly be on alert, to be able to switch your attention at a moment’s notice to check if it’s actually a threat.
Another notable aspect to the game is that it has what the playerbase has termed “Aggression-Based Match-Making”, something that many people felt that they were noticing early on, that vocal sections of the community loudly claimed wasn’t actually happening, and then was confirmed later on by several devs and then eventually the CEO. In a fairly short temporal window, appearing to be something like last 5-10 games played, the game rates essentially your interactions with other players on a spectrum from peaceful to hostile, then preferentially matches you with other players with a similar score. This has created a dichotomy of “friendly” lobbies versus “sweaty” lobbies, the former being places where players happily jog right past each other or loot the same rooms together while cheerfully exchanging pleasantries over proximity chat, asking if you’re looking for anything in particular, etc., where the latter are “Kill on Sight” games where everybody is at minimum a threat to be assessed and, more likely, something to be eliminated ASAP. This can of course be gamed, so players will play peacefully for many games, then having been placed in a “friendly” lobby, murder all the people playing with their guard down, then rinse and repeat. I actually don’t mind this because it creates a tension during every game where actually still being friendly is a reward unto itself, and you learn to observe suspicious behaviors on the part of other players (do they have their gun out, do they keep trying to move behind me, etc).
There also isn’t a giant chasm in terms of gear impacting the gameplay. Two of the best TTK guns in the game are dirt-common and can in fact be weapons that you spawn in with when using a “free” loadout. This upsets a lot of people who have spent a lot of time and effort to have a fully-kitted loadout, only to be easily ambushed and lose everything to somebody who literally invested nothing. While this feels bad, with an extraction shooter, you don’t want godlike powers granted to people who have been playing the game far longer than anybody else. Being able to take out just about anybody with crap equipment if you know what you’re doing is probably the right side to err on – and also probably cementing the idea that losing everything is something that you should be used to, as it is a hallmark of the genre.
