Why Is Everyone in ARC Raiders So Dang Nice?
ARC Raiders has been a massive hit. It released smack dab in the middle of new releases from shooter juggernauts Battlefield and Call of Duty, yet now has a concurrent player count on Steam that surpasses both of them combined. This is huge, especially for a new IP that’s not a free-to-play title.
After spending ten hours with it, I can see why people are hooked. The gameplay loop of loading into a map, looting, encountering a couple players, then extracting is enough to keep me hooked. Shooting a gun in this game feels great - it’s so satisfying to chip away huge chunks of metal from the game’s ARC robots. The sound design is excellent, and the game’s overall art direction is gorgeous, with this retro cassette vibe that reminds you of Star Wars while still feeling visually distinct.
What’s surprising ARC Raiders then is that a game this popular, whose player count dwarfs the combined populations of the two biggest triple-A shooters out right now, has the single friendliest playerbase of any online game I’ve ever played. Going into ARC Raiders, I was primed to be screwed over and shot at by every player I ran into, but as of writing this I have been shot by another player once, which was on accident after we teamed up to fight robots together. I’m not complaining, but I’m kinda confused. How did this happen?
Non-Lethal Company
ARC Raiders was my introduction to the extraction shooter genre. Like “metroidvania” and “roguelike,” “extraction shooter” is one of those gaming genre terms that’s got that word salad energy. ARC is my only point of reference for what that term really means, but in practice it refers to a multiplayer game where you’re dropped into a map with a bunch of other players and sent out to loot stuff. If you get killed during a match, be it by another player or an NPC, you lose all of your loot and start back at square one. It’s kind of like a battle royale like Apex Legends or Fortnite then, but it deviates from them in that you get to keep any loot you find during a match, provided you’re able to extract from the map. The goal of an extraction shooter isn’t to be the last player standing, it’s really just to make it out of the match alive with whatever loot you’ve gathered.
Knowing that one mistake could cost you to lose everything you’ve gathered in a match (along with any weapons or items you brought into it) makes ARC Raiders a tense experience. You’re constantly on your guard, as any of the game’s ARC robots can easily kill you if you slip up or get overwhelmed. The same goes for other players, or at least it would if this essay was called something other than Why is Everyone in ARC Raiders So Dang Nice?
On paper, an extraction shooter like ARC Raiders sounds like it’d incentivize PvP fights. To some degree, it does. Daily challenges might ask you to deal damage to other players or loot their bodies, and the best loot is always more likely to be on another player’s person than in a crate somewhere on the map. I have no problem ambushing another player in a game like Apex Legends and stealing everything they’re carrying, but the idea of doing that in ARC Raiders gives me the same nerves I feel before giving a presentation in front of a small crowd. Part of this is because the goal in ARC Raiders isn’t to be the last player standing but I think that, more than anything, it’s because ARC Raiders is built to constantly remind you that the people you’re playing with are real people with lives beyond the game.
Like games like Lethal Company and DayZ, ARC Raiders has proximity chat functionality. This allows you to hear the voices of other players when you’re near them. In practice, this means that you can call out to other players when you see them and tell them you’re friendly, or that other players can give away their position by talking, allowing you to easily sneak up on them. You don’t have to use ARC Raiders’ proximity chat if you don’t want to, but by shutting your mic off you run the risk of other players assuming that you’re not friendly. If you bump into another player and they go, “Yo, I’m friendly!” and you just stand there in silence, they’re much more likely to assume you’re not trustworthy than if you popped on the mic and said “Hey, same here!”
Other systems further incentivize being kind to your fellow Raider. ARC Raiders’ sound design is excellent, and the pop-pop of gunshots can be heard across the map, alerting other Raiders to your location. Should you kill another player, doing so will cause a signal flare to automatically fire from their corpse up into the sky, alerting anyone around to see it. If a player wanders over towards the flare and sees you before you see them, they might figure out you’re the one who killed the other player and open fire before you can react. Staying nice allows you to stay quiet and draw less attention to yourself, while also ensuring other players don’t see you as a threat.
Yesterday, I logged onto ARC and saw that I had a challenge to deal damage to other players. Doing this would give me some in-game currency, so I loaded into a match and decided to wander around until I found another player. After a minute or two, I heard another player through the proximity chat happily whistling to himself as he looted a couple buildings. I was decently far away from him but he still spotted me, and when he did he stopped whistling and went “Yo, hey! I’m friendly over here!” I knew that I could easily just start blasting at this guy and steal all of his loot, but I also knew that he meant no harm and was probably just as worried as me that someone would kill me and steal my gear. I just stopped and had a second where I was like “How the hell am I supposed to kill this guy when he’s so nice?”
Raider Voices
When I was weighing whether or not to buy ARC Raiders, what I kept going back and forth on the most was how I felt about the idea of talking to other players. I almost always keep my mic off in online games, so ARC Raiders encouraging you to talk to other players as much as it does honestly felt daunting.
Wondering if anyone else had felt the same, I went to the game’s subreddit and searched “social anxiety.” I wanted to see if anyone felt the same, as well as if anyone had any tips about how to best communicate with other players. I clicked through a couple posts, and the cycle of overthinking simple interactions with strangers in a video game was broken when one commenter said something like “just use the voice changer lol.” “Oh, so that’s like an in-game item or something, right?” I remember thinking. You fool. You absolute fool.
Buried in ARC Raiders’ audio settings is a section called “Raider Voice Beta.” A pop-up tells you that “Raider Voice lets you select a voice for your Raider, and change how you sound in party and proximity voice chat.” It’s a straight-up voice changer, and finding out how good this voice changer was blew my mind.
You can set it so that it’s only heard by other players in the proximity chat or by everyone, including the people you’re in a party with. It comes with ten different voices to choose from - five masculine and feminine voices each with varying pitches - and most of them sound really convincing. For reference, here’s what Twitch streamer Nyanners, who has a softer, feminine voice, sounds like when she uses one of the male Raider Voices.
ARC Raiders’ voice changer is far from the first of its kind, as AI-powered voice-changing software like Voicemod have been around for a while now. However, it’s the first to be integrated seamlessly into the game itself. Masking your voice with someone else’s is as simple as heading into the settings and pushing a few buttons. It’s impressive, but it sounds like a pretty niche feature, right? That moment of “holy crap, I can’t believe this game has a built-in voice changer that’s this good” becomes “wait, why is this feature even here in the first place?” Is it just so male players can pretend to be women in the hopes of getting better loot?
Embark hasn’t provided any official reasoning for why this feature was implemented, but I think it’s to make the player more comfortable with speaking over the mic. When I played Call of Duty as a kid, I always kept my mic muted out of fear of being labeled a “squeaker” thanks to my twelve-year-old voice, and I’d imagine that being able to hide a voice I was self-conscious about would’ve gotten me to speak up more. Female players who don’t want to be harassed for being women can hide their feminine voices, trans players can use a voice that aligns more closely with their gender identity, and streamers with recognizable voices can hide them with the push of a button. ARC Raiders rewards you greatly for getting to know the other players in your lobby, and if the idea of using your real voice makes you uncomfortable, the Raider Voice is meant to gently nudge you towards chatting with other players.
The Ballad of CrazyPicklePoop
Earlier, I mentioned a match I played where I tried bringing myself to kill another player but just couldn’t do it. Later on in that same match, I decided to try completing a quest the game had given me. It asked me to activate a comms terminal in a certain region of the map, so I made my way up there and stumbled onto a group of three other guys hanging out at an abandoned fort. I chatted with them for a bit and found that they were all trying to do the same exact thing. We eventually came to the (wrong) conclusion that, in order to activate this comms terminal, we needed to find a fuel cell, which we’d plug into these power stations dotted throughout the building. One of the players, a guy named “CrazyPicklePoop,” veered off from the rest of us and towards a nearby road. As I looted the carcass of a robot I’d shot down, I heard a distant CrazyPicklePoop shouting “MAYDAY! HEY! HEYYYYY!” as if he was dying in real life. I ran towards the street, and as I approached CrazyPicklePoop his screams grew louder. He was lying in the middle of the road, bleeding out, as four ARC robots hovered over him. He gasped out “I FOUND IT! I FOUND IT!” as if they were his actual last words.
Behind me, I heard the other players shout “Oh god!” as they saw what was happening. I brought a smoke grenade into the match with me, and I threw it on top of CrazyPicklePoop as he crawled towards me. Clouded in the smoke, I thought I could revive him, but I didn’t have a Defibrillator on me to get him back on his feet. Surrounded on all four sides, the robots flying above us shot indiscriminately into the smoke, some of their bullets nicking me as CrazyPicklePoop shouted “Don’t be a hero! DON’T BE A HERO!” Somehow, all of us took out the enemy ARC, and with his dying words CrazyPicklePoop croaked “Just go down the road… You’ll find it…” before pretending to cough up blood. His body then went limp, firing off a signal flare into the rainy evening sky.
A couple minutes later, I was chatting with another player about what just went down. He’d only seen the tail end of it, so I was filling him in on it while laughing my ass off. We decided we’d extract together, and we kept chatting as we walked.
I remember saying something like “Yeah man, this game’s messed up. I’m not built for it,” before laughing.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, like… I have this challenge to deal 110 damage to other players with weapons that use Heavy Ammo, right?”
The other player pulled out his gun, as if to say “Don’t try anything.” “Yeah?” he said.
I continued. “But like, everyone in this game is so dang nice. Earlier, I was like ‘I’m gonna shoot at the first guy I see,’ but that guy was a dude who was whistling to himself like a cartoon character. He was so happy, dude. It felt like being asked to kick a puppy.”
The other player put his gun away and laughed. “Yeah, that’s how it is.”
I don’t know if ARC Raiders is my favorite shooter of the year - Battlefield 6 is pretty damn peak - but it has my favorite playerbase by a mile. Even though it encourages PvP through challenges and the inherent structure of an extraction shooter, and currently retains a massive playerbase that dwarfs those of its competitors, ARC Raiders has built an ultimately kind playerbase through incentivizing cooperation and encouraging players to turn on their microphone and talk to people. Don’t get me wrong, shooters that encourage you to see your enemies as faceless bad guys are still a lot of fun - again, Battlefield 6 is pretty damn peak - but I’ve never really seen a game do what ARC Raiders is doing. It’s a breath of fresh air, and it has me actively looking forward to talking with other players in-game. “Man, I’m really looking forward to talking to randoms in a PvP game today!” isn’t a sentence that any sane person should ever want to say, but somehow ARC Raiders has got me thinking it every time I boot it up.