yeah i will say the types of games i play have trained me to have more of a resistance to this kind of thing but hunt is absolutely very stressful, especially while you’re learning (and you’re learning for a looong time). even though i’ve played some 500 hours or something i still like to frame my games as “learning” because it helps take the edge off to perform and treating each game as a relatively fresh start helps reinforce that.
i’ve never played tarkov – my intro to extraction shooters was maybe that half-baked mode in call of duty and then hunt. hunt made me think that maybe i should dip my toes further into the genre so i tried arc raiders.
as a whole i landed somewhere in the middle on arc raiders – it didn’t grab me the way i hoped it would. the best part is absolutely the ai enemies. they’re all trained w/ reinforced learning and so they move in an unnatural chaotic way that is just really fun to play against and absolutely terrifying for quite a while. the maps are all gorgeous and detailed and convincing. there’s beautiful dynamic lighting that can support different times of day and weather conditions. the big set-pieces with the almost raid-like giant bots are super cool too. i had a great time working together with a couple other teams to take a queen down.
but once the newness faded away and i started to understand the game more it started to grate on me. for starters, PvP third person shooter combat is just strictly inferior to first person in my eyes. third person often results in these dumb staring contests, because you can look down a hallway with no risk to yourself, which in turn makes stalemates and inaction a lot more common. first person means that to gather information you have to take a direct risk, which makes things happen!
the community of arc is weirdly friendly, to the point that if you want to work together with random people you find, you can and they won’t betray like 80% of the time. at first i thought this was kind of a cool vibe but the more i played the more i realized this cut into the competition in a negative way. the game is incomplete and becomes boring without player conflict but there are a large number of people that don’t even want to fight you, and on top of that people try to flip back to “hey we could have been friends” in voice chat when they get beaten and it can be hard to tell how invested they actually were in that aspect in the first place.
and eventually the ai get more rote to fight or avoid and the fear and atmosphere start to wear off a bit as you learn the game and the maps more and now i’m playing a game with worse PvP than hunt that a significant portion of the player base doesn’t even want to fully engage with and on top of that it additionally has all those little points of friction with the looting and inventory that i enumerated in posts above.
i don’t think it’s a bad game but i do think it’s a confused game. hearing about its rough development process made sense to me – it was originally meant to be more of a co-op vs. ai game similar to helldivers, it was missing something, and so they pivoted late to this extraction PvPvE idea. i think the inventory and crafting and looting and ui all feel a step removed from a minimum viable product and needed way more time in the oven. that overarching context did give me a bit of a pull, but i can’t accept that as an opportunity cost that cuts into the things i like in hunt. a game with slightly better PvE and some aspects that feel less video-gamey than hunt but much worse PvP + a bunch of chores & friction doesn’t quite add up.
like, we can theory craft all we want about games we don’t play but speaking for myself, i’m very often wrong about what i actually like, or what i have the potential to like. so if i have an interest in something, even if there are elements that push me away, i still try to give it an honest chance and i’m very often surprised by what i get out of it. maybe a slight majority of the time my reservations about certain aspects do end up feeling justified, but in the context of the game i often end up getting something of value out of it that outweighs or overshadows those aspects anyway.
e.g. i tried valorant because i traditionally played shooters with longer times to kill, and didn’t understand how a game predicated on “just reflexes” would be fun. i didn’t end up sticking with valorant (mostly for toxic community reasons), but it did show me that low ttk promotes a style of shooting that i found i enjoyed. with low ttk, information and tactics are the main drivers of who win a fight. the aiming does matter, but it ends up emphasizing other compelling aspects at the same time.
playing valorant gave me the confidence to try hunt, another game with low ttk, and i ended up finding that the light extraction shooter elements in hunt helped craft a bit of a narrative that made the game slightly more compelling. and that, in turn, is why i tried arc.
i have the same reservations w/ marathon as i did with arc, and having played and reflected on my time with arc, i’ve not seen many meaningful differences between it and marathon. plus the comparisons to apex & longer ttk scare me in the context of an extraction shooter and the whole art theft thing is a major downer. but i do still plan on trying it during the free week because i’m still slightly interested and have been wrong before and trying things and disliking them feels preferable to entrenching myself in a dilapidated grumpy old man castle.
but also, like, i heavily identify with the grumpy old man. i am often him too! there’s a tiredness that can creep up on you, when you make negative predictions and are seemingly proven right over and over and over again. like the world is hard, especially now, and it’s a privilege to have enough mental overhead to want to engage with things that you predict will disappoint you.
i painfully sincere-post and talk about the things i’m passionate about because my stubborn almost evidence-defying optimism is one of the few things that keep me afloat. but i don’t have disdain for the folks that post more negatively. weirdly it ends up being an impetus for me to think and examine my feelings on a topic that results in a clarity about it i did not have before. i trust the people in this community, even if they’re a bit prickly sometimes, because i understand where it comes from. in general this community isn’t trying to dunk on one another – we want to be proven wrong and to perceive the world through someone who sees it a little more positively.
