I don’t think you’re quite able to grasp how terrible I am at ARC Raiders. I’m the sort of bad that would cause a scandal on YouTube, as I uselessly flail about, stumbling into the paths of angry robots, getting shot in the back of the head as I search wardrobes, and forget which button is which in a frenzied panic of trying to run away but instead blowing myself up with a grenade. And yet, as wildly incapable as I am, I cannot stop playing this game.
To give you an idea of how much I want to just play another round of ARC Raiders at any given point, I bought a second copy of the game for my Xbox over the weekend so I could play it downstairs away from my PC, too. I came dangerously close to figuring out how to “Xbox anywhere” on Sunday, when I was trapped for six hours, two hours from home, taking my kid to his reptile academy because that’s a thing. I mean, I didn’t do that, I’m not quite that far gone. But I really gave it some consideration.
The loop, you see, is so compelling. You begin in an underground base, select a minimal amount of equipment to take with you to the surface, and then try to scavenge as much loot as you can, while completing tasks, avoiding dying, and getting to an extraction point before time runs out. If you fail, you lose everything you had with you. If you succeed, you feel like a goddamn hero.
© Embark Studios / Kotaku
Warfare of Attrition
As someone who tries to play as many new, unknown games as possible on any given day, I do have something of a propensity for slipping behind on some new big things. There are only so many hours in a day, and occasionally I just have to say, “I’ll figure out extraction shooters another time.” Then I played Escape From Duckov and it was over. “Oh!” I told my empty room, “It’s if an RPG and a roguelite had a baby. Then I’m all in!”
My immediate issue was my all-consuming hatred of multiplayer gaming. Other people are disconcertingly unknowable, and the last place I want them showing up is in my video gaming—if I wanted to deal with their shit I’d have stayed outdoors. And less than anything else, I don’t want to be teaming up with people. Brrrrr. Suddenly it’s not playing; it becomes responsibility. People are depending on me to not fuck up, to do the thing they all want to do the way they all want to do it, and I get more than enough of that sort of pressure being a parent. Nope, games are me-time, and just me. So what did extraction shooters have to offer me given my personal foibles?
Honestly, the reason I even tried ARC is because Claire won’t shut up about it. She’d convinced me it was special, even the other day in Slack soundly arguing that the game is enhanced by not having a PvE option because of the added level of terrifying danger it provides. The key information being, by Claire’s account, that most other players don’t try to shoot you on sight, given everyone’s just trying to survive.
The very first player I saw in the game shot me on sight.
It was an ignominious beginning. However, so much else going on around it was already winning me over, and as it was my very first run, things were pretty low stakes. That person was a total asshole, of course, and I hope their credit card information gets stolen and there’s an inexplicable payment for $27.30 in Romania on their account and they have to change all their cards as a result. But it wasn’t enough to put me off.
Oscar “OscarH” Heen from Sweden
© Steam / Kotaku
The person who shot my near-dead body, slumped over the terminal that lowers the extraction elevator, after I’d painstakingly crawled my way in there and made it with seconds to spare and an inventory full of perfect loot: that came a lot closer to having me give up. That person was called Oscar Heen, from Sweden, with the Steam name OscarH, and if you see them in the game please ruin their every run. What did Oscar “OscarH” Heen stand to gain? There wasn’t time to loot my corpse—the doors were all but closed, the lift was about to descend. It was mindless cruelty. I hate them. They are my nemesis.
But despite this, Claire was right. Most people do nothing. There’s usually a hesitation as you spot each other, both desperately hoping the other isn’t some sort of OscarH-like piece of shit, perhaps emitting a “DON’T SHOOT!” cry of pacifism, before dashing off in opposite directions. And yes, as much as I would still thump my fist down hard on a PvE option should it ever get added to the game, it definitely does add a huge amount. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s part of why I don’t want to stop playing no matter how bad I am.
Misanthropic Co-op
Because, as much as the core loop with its perpetual gruesome gamble (I should stress there’s no real gambling at all, just the constant chance that you’ll lose your favorite items should you fail) is compelling as hell, what makes ARC Raiders stand out to me is how well it captures the post-apocalyptic horror of the best TV shows and movies: that awful moment when your person sees a stranger across an abandoned parking lot, or walking through the trees in a nearby woods. Is this it? Is everything about to become utter awfulness? Or will there be a concerned exchange of glances, and then the gradual waning of adrenaline as both get on with their previous plans.
Occasionally there are even better moments, incidents of tense co-operation. If I see someone being plagued by three or four drones, clearly pinned down and struggling to survive, of course I’ll take a pot shot at one of them and try to provide a distraction so they can escape. I don’t want any interaction with them, for the excellent reasons stated above, but I’m delighted if I can improve their day.
And once, and only once so far, I had the splendid experience of taking down a big, horrid stompy robot enemy alongside another player, both of us focusing our bullets at it and not each other, and then sharing the spoils between us as we looted its many pockets. There was no communication, not even eye contact. We killed it, we looted it, we sprinted away in opposite directions. If only real life interactions could work this way.
© Embark Studios / Kotaku
Weaponized Incompetence
But the above tale does somewhat give the impression that I might occasionally display any degree of competence, and I want to make sure that no one goes away with that impression. I’m not sure how the above worked out, and we can probably assume most of the credit goes to the other player, but it’s atypical. I swear, most of my runs end in just a single drone taking me out because I’m so involved in searching a locker that I just assume the whirring blades and bleep-blooping warnings are for someone else outside. KAPOW, and I’m crawling, and there’s no hope of rescue.
Or I decide, for literally no reason at all, that it’ll be interested to see what happens if I throw a grenade at that vast spider-bot. I mean, I did that earlier today. I had some great loot, a clear run to extraction, but figured it’d be fun to find out. It immediately murdered me, with the help of the three drones my actions aggroed, obviously. Of course that’s what happened. Of course I lost everything again. And I’ll do it again.
I was getting somewhere with the game! Look, I’m only level 10 despite playing for hours, and I’ve chosen so poorly on the skill tree that I’m not even going to show you. I just keep picking new things because they sound cool—I’ve got literally one category with more than one point in it. I know better than this. But I’m apparently just pre-programmed to be dreadful at ARC Raiders.
And yet I’m about to play again. Claire just gave me a bunch of advice for making some progress, and I’m about to go spectacularly fail at it. And then fail at it some more. And then some more. And then—thanks to the option to share my failure across both versions— head downstairs and fail at it all again on my Xbox.
