Last week I was: making friends with every raider over a mutual hunt for lemons in Arc Raiders.
This week I've been: continuing to team up with players in Arc Raiders, and blasting the mean ones.
As much as I love the nail-biting tension of extraction shooters, it's long been a genre obsessed with a rigorous gear grind and slow pace that make it almost impenetrable for new players, or those that can't dedicate more than a few hours a day or even a week. The one exception to this until now has been Hunt: Showdown, and while I can't recommend it enough, let's face it, it's not your typical extraction shooter.
So, for all these years, the extraction shooter has remained the dominion of a select few with enough time and patience to dedicate to it—and invariably trounce anyone who dares to give it a casual go.
Of course, with enough time and determination, you'll eventually join that elite band, but my point is that the genre isn't known for being welcoming and even semi-casual. If you want a genre to truly grow and experiment, encouraging a more diverse audience will do it.
Just as I thought perhaps the genre would never become truly mainstream—not even Bungie's Marathon seems to be breaking through—in comes Arc Raiders, somehow capturing the intensity and fear that any of its competitors do, but does so without requiring you to invest countless hours to keep up, nor feel like you're hit with the reset baton when you die. Loot matters, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Oh, and there are cool robots that make you shit yourself and encourage you to forge uneasy bonds with your fellow raiders.
What Arc Raiders nails on the head is a streamlined loot system that offers advantages as you move up tiers, but largely against its PvE robots than against other players in PvP. The best weapons, like the rare Hullcracker or Jupiter, specialise in punching through the toughest machines thanks to increased armour penetration.
Higher-tier assault rifles, pistols, and so on don't really do all that much more damage to players than the basic guns you'll find in free loadouts. Instead, they come with better handling, bigger magazines, or faster reloads. Better guns are better, but it's never the reason you win or lose a fight.
Even the way shields and healing work ensures the gap between cheap/common and expensive/rare items is never an insurmountable rift.
In other words, you'll never be a new player or have recently died and lost your items, and continually run into a brick wall of high-level, end-game players dominating every match.
This more casual, forgiving nature continues into Arc Raiders' many welcome quality-of-life additions. Firstly, there's Scrappy—your pet rooster—who will collect basic crafting materials for you between matches. This means that you're never without the basics, and you don't need to waste time collecting scrap metal, fabric, and so on. That's not the fun part of an extraction shooter, after all.
Then there are the handy item tooltips that explain exactly what each thing does and roughly where to look to get more. You're not often scratching your head, wondering why or where to pick up random tat. Combined with a generous, upgradable stash, easily accessible safe pockets on runs, and a quick auto-unloading backpack after a match, you spend less time faffing around in your inventory and more time with what makes Arc Raiders unique.
Of course, I can't forget the skill tree, which is a surprisingly perfect addition to an extraction shooter. Whether you extract alive or not, you'll have earned XP from looting, shooting, and more. Rewarding time-invested, you might think this undermines every other aspect and reintroduces the typical end-game advantage Arc Raiders evidently aims to avoid. However, it's balanced in such a way to feel like you're always progressing, but without making any particular skill too impactful overall. Again, you won't win or lose because of your skills.
Lastly, Arc Raiders also does something very unique with a controversial genre staple: wipes. In an active effort to avoid forcing account resets on players like Tarkov does, instead of mandatory wipes, those who want a fresh start can participate in Expedition Projects every eight or so weeks. It's effectively a quest to build a caravan and retire your character, starting mostly anew but with several bonuses for your next character. If that's not a perfect solution to both hardcore and casual players' concerns, then I don't know what is.
These efforts to finally make an extraction shooter for the masses without sacrificing what makes the genre so appealing have undoubtedly paid off, and I can't wait to see where it goes next.
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