Game purchased for review.
Arc Raiders is a beautifully crafted experience that highlights the limitations of its genre.
This is an extraction shooter, which means a game where players, either solo or in teams, embark on perilous expeditions into hostile territory and attempts to escape as unscathed as possible. Hideouts serve as temporary respite, where traders send the adventurers out on new missions for better gear.
Each mission is a variation of only a handful of quest types. You either find a thing to kill, an item to extract, or a piece of machinery to fix. It is busywork expanded into the gameplay loop entire. Where Arc Raiders comes out on top is presentation. This is one of the most beautiful games released this year. On a purely technical level, it reaches a level of immersion most never do.
Sadly, the pretty exterior carries the game only so far. Once you've seen the first ten or so hours of the gameplay, you've seen everything that Arc Raiders has to offer. At least for now, though the promised release calendar does little to indicate that anything will change dramatically in coming months.
But that's the problem with service titles such as this. Arc Raiders lives off the promise of what it can become one day. It is cut from the same cloth as Battlefield 6 in that it expects you to invest into potential that may never come to fruition.
In its current form, Arc Raiders is an undeniably enticing offering, but one that hits the walls of its genre and gameplay loop extremely quickly. It began life as a PVE - player vs. environment - title and shifted into a PVPVE format when the developers realized how hard it would be to create new content for just a PVE title.
So, they took the path of least resistance and instead cultivated an environment that breeds toxicity. As of now, Arc Raiders suffers from the same root issue every other extraction shooter does: Its own players.
My best moments with Arc Raiders exist in spite of other players, not because of them. The world is a dizzying and immersive experience, where every single raid feels like a challenge. Even if the missions themselves are repetitive and shallow, it always feels like a joy to dive in and hope that a leaping robot spider doesn't chase us to our deaths.
Sadly, these excursions usually end with groups of angry young men ganging up on others, happily ignoring pleas to just let others enjoy the game on their own terms. Usually these moments are accompanied by slurs and toxic screaming on the voice chat, which is a sad necessity, as the limited pre-recorded dialog doesn't convey enough to smooth these situations when they occur.
If there was an alternative PVE mode or map, this wouldn't be an issue. Everyone is free to enjoy their experience how they see fit. But Arc Raiders does not offer that choice. Instead, there's a sense the developers enjoy the grief caused by bad actors playing their game. After all, everyone's talking about it.
There's barely any story to speak of, and most probably won't bother with the flavor texts or characters in Speranza, humanity's last haven underground. Missions follow the same strict paths as in any other game of this type, and despite the multiplayer aspect of it all, it never feels like you're actually making any kind of difference in this world. That's because you really can't. This is a static experience with the potential for subjectively great moments.
When you reach the end of the repetitive mission cycle, all Arc Raiders offers is the chance to restart the whole thing over again. A reset is offered every few months to allow new players a chance to join in. But that feels like a bandaid trying to cover a gaping wound. The maps themselves won't change, and those that get enjoyment out of crummy behavior will just keep at it because this is familiar turf for them.
With little incentives to play nice, Arc Raiders becomes just another extraction shooter in different clothing. Yes, it's beautiful and imaginative clothing, but it's all the same cut and make in the end.
It's a shame, too, as Arc Raiders is technically the most proficient release we've seen all year. It works great even on limited hardware, there's barely any graphical issues, and apart from a hiccup with the servers on launch weekend, everything runs rock solid. You can tell that people with vast experience in the multiplayer space worked on this thing, and they should be proud of their accomplishments.
The bigger issue is the use of AI, which the developer has remained frustratingly vague and cagey on. As far as it's known at the present, at least the voice acting features AI readings the developers can adjust to their needs when they add new content. This way they don't need to hire the voice actors back for new recording sessions. It's the first step in the nightmarish scenario ahead for game development, where talent suffers more each passing year.
It is, once again, another area where the creators of Arc Raiders could have taken steps towards something better and didn't.
Having said that, it's hard to recommend Arc Raiders to anyone but the fiercely devoted. It is burning bright now, but there's so little to differentiate it from the competition that anything can and most likely will topple it from that throne. If it had dared to think outside of the limitations of the extraction shooter genre, it could have come upon something really special.
Now, it's just a good extraction shooter, and what a shame that is.
