When I first went Topside in Arc Raiders, I was convinced that it would go down similarly to Tarkov: no talking, just fighting. But I was pleasantly surprised when I found this to not be the case at all.
Arc Raiders has managed to find itself in a sweet spot for PvPvE where a shared hatred of arcs and greed for their loot binds strangers together, resulting in some truly brilliant cooperative plays. Something that the devs weren't 100% sure they'd see.
"Anytime you push a game out into the world and see the community play it, the way that they engage with it is often surprising," Robert Sammelin, art director at Embark, told PC Gamer in an interview this week. "I think internally we were hoping that we would strike this balance of having people almost apprehensive on how they're going to interact with other people, that there is this tension, this underpinning of threat, but also the greater exterior threat with the arcs would perhaps invite these sorts of cooperative scenarios.
"But I think internally, play testing with devs, we're way worse people than the community when it comes to how we engage in combat. We were certainly hoping that we would see cooperation happen, but I think to the extent that it happens at launch, and seeing how people treat each other socially is heartwarming, it is really uplifting to see."
You rarely see this kind of cooperation in extraction shooters, especially considering players actually benefit from others dying, as it means they can loot their corpse for worthwhile items. It's a feature of the community that I really hope doesn't change too much.
"We got some figures on how many people have been downed by another player, and they were surprisingly low," Sammelin says. "But there's also quite a different experience in playing with a squad or solo. I think that also opens up for a very different experience, depending on how you choose to engage with the game."
But while I've had a lot of pleasantly memorable moments with randos in Arc Raiders, I've also witnessed the dark side of the alleged aggression-based matchmaking, as I have been placed in some truly evil lobbies. So it's not all sunshine and rainbows when raiding arcs, especially if you decide to enter the newest map, Stella Montis.
"Some are geared more towards PvP," Sammelin explains. "I'm personally terrified of Stella Montis. I play a lot of solo, but then I play with my brothers, coworkers, and friends. Stella Montis is… You need to be prepared for it."
Heed that advice. Stella Montis isn't just home to the terrifying Shredder, but is also the location of some evil raider-made traps. One player turned the whole map into a death maze, while I've seen others trap unsuspecting victims in storage rooms full of trailblazers, showstoppers, and snap blast grenades. It's a bloodbath out there.
Luckily for the faint of heart (me), not all maps are made evil. "I have a real soft spot for Dam Battlegrounds," Sammelin says. "It is one of those well-rounded maps for the experience of the game, because it's also the first map that you engage with. But I also have a very strong love for Buried City, for what it is, the complexity of it, the look of it, the way that you move in and out of buildings. It prompts curiosity to a higher degree than most maps."
I've only been curious once on Buried City, and it ended with me dead under the foot of the Bombardier in Plaza Rosa. But at least all the raiders I encountered up until that point were nice to me.
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