Destructoid Checkpoint: The slippery slope of ARC Raiders

ARC Raiders is proving to be yet another aberration for the gaming industry this year. The big extraction shooter of 2025 was supposed to be Bungie’s Marathon, but after they dropped the ball, releasing a low-energy technical test that failed to set the world alight, resulting in a tactical delay of its release, the folks at Embark were more than happy to step up and offer everyone an interesting surprise.

ARC Raiders is an immensely fun extraction shooter, where fantastic world design combines with emergent systems to get you pushing at the fabric of the machine, figuring out where it bends and where it breaks, and what rewards you and what kills you.

More impressively—and importantly—ARC Raiders has quickly developed a community where many people seem far more focused on working together than on ganking each other. It is this aspect that I want to focus on, as it is going against the grain.

Emphasis on “shooter”

I don’t wish to besmirch the honor of the average extraction shooter enjoyer, but for many of us, ill behavior between players is the whole point of the genre. The attraction is the competition. You take your aim, reflexes, map knowledge, and game smarts, and you battle it out. The winner leaves with the prize, and the loser is reduced to a loot drop.

Perhaps the king of the genre, Escape from Tarkov, is best known as a cruel and unusual sweat-fest, while Hunt: Showdown actively encourages violence between parties of players by sending you after the same monstrous targets. For many people, especially those who have never actually played the genre before, the extraction shooter is all about player-on-player friction. 

Noted French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre developed a concept called the practico-inert, where the things that people do will, over time, become the things that people have always done, gaining not just justification because of that history, but also becoming de facto social norms. The boundaries of tradition will become a limitation on available choice, even for those who were never present in the establishment of those traditions in the first place. In the case of gaming, this can often mean that the people who love a title the most end up enforcing unspoken rules of behavior that can actually be detrimental to the overall experience. 

This tends to happen a lot when gaming communities become hyper-focused on competitive elements. New players are often farmed rather than given time to improve and contribute, thus limiting the overall success and lifespan of the game. Everyone who joins after a certain arbitrary date is a noob or a tourist, there to be dominated by the veterans.

So, for the extraction shooter, the early bloodbaths of the genre became established as the proper way to play it, a natural rendering down of the tensions of their progenitor games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Rust, and Day-Z, where a burgeoning YouTube scene rewarded excess and, occasionally, cruel shenanigans between players with an audience eager to watch people socially engineer and outsmart each other. 

Over time, this has helped establish the emphasis on player-versus-player action within the extraction shooter genre, at least in the public consciousness. What makes ARC Raiders so surprising is its community focus on player-versus-environment gameplay. The rules of the genre may have arisen without common consensus or forethought, but ARC Raiders players are choosing to break them.

Serial numbers

To go back to Sartre, he would likely find extraction shooters to be incredibly interesting for the same reason that most players do: the idea of fake scarcity. Sartre referred to interhuman relations in practico-inert systems as seriality. The system doesn’t care about who you are, and you don’t care about the system or the other people within it, as long as it is all working as intended. You are, in a way, interchangeable. A server doesn’t stop if you are not on it; it simply loads in another player.

The concept of seriality dictates that the thing that people have in common, bundles of strangers who move through everyday life, is little more than the thing that they are doing, and most will have little reason to engage in expressions of the self that contradict assumptions established by practico-inert systems unless faced with an indication of scarcity. 

Sartre’s favorite example of this was people waiting for the bus. You go to the bus stop, and you stand in line. The line can be replaced around you, or you can be replaced in the line, and nothing would change. You are all just people waiting for the bus, so you are largely indifferent to each other. Where things get interesting is if the bus is late or full. If that happens, you all move from indifference to being competitive with each other. The unspoken but accepted rules of the line dictate that the first person gets on the bus, then the second, then the third. If the fifth person feels there are only four seats, they may interpret the fourth person as a competitor and act outside the practico-inert rules that we all understand while waiting for a bus, and seek to cut in line.

Extraction shooters are interesting because their intent is to expose you to one of the things that Sartre always surmised would cause people to break their seriality, or their prescribed role in a system. From the get-go, you enter into an extraction shooter match with the understanding that loot and rewards are rare and are to be competed for. 

In a Player-versus-player-versus-environment game that is dialed up by adding risk, as sometimes dangerous enemies must be farmed to get the required or valued rewards. It becomes a logical choice to attack players who are engaged in this because they are distracted, potentially injured, and likely low on ammo. 

ARC Raiders players are not, for the most part, doing that. Instead, the common story, as seen in multiple viral videos and clips, is that people are helping each other. VOIP is used to establish if another player is friendly, and then trust is extended. People are taking each other at their word. It seems on rare occasions this will backfire, and someone gets betrayed or backstabbed, but there are more positive stories than negative stories doing the rounds.

But what is it about ARC Raiders that is allowing people to overcome the unspoken rules of the genre and break with seriality in a positive manner?

Embarking on a new adventure

The answer is “nothing.” There is nothing inherent about ARC Raiders' design that influences players towards these acts of cooperation and kindness toward each other. The game is, like all extraction shooters, set up to funnel potentially weakened groups of players into each other in the hope of establishing an emergent gameplay scenario.

The devs cannot know for a fact that you will shoot each other, but the historic nature and established tone of the genre imply that this is the likely outcome. It is the players themselves who are introducing a surprising amount of cooperation between each other into the game. 

I think the main reason that this is happening is that players are increasingly eager to overcome manipulative game design elements (this is no shade to Embark; I simply mean the manipulative nature of the core design philosophy of PvPvE) and express themselves in a way that feels aberrant to expectation. In ARC Raiders, they can do this by being nice people. Not only do they get to go against the grain, but it has other benefits, too. 

By being nice and making allies, the environment itself becomes easier to overcome. Extraction, the entire point of the game, becomes simpler to achieve; you can get out with your loot and, more importantly, shared positive memories. You will also enjoy an extra line of defence in the event that you do run into a potential bad actor in the game. 

There is an old adage that, for someone to win, someone else must lose, but I am reminded of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. High-jumpers Mutaz Essa Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi had competed to a stalemate. With jumps of 2.37 meters and no faults, they were told that they could continue raising the height. Instead, one of them asked a simple question, a moment of aberration in a competition where hundreds of athletes trained not just to win, but to ensure everyone else lost.

“Can we have two golds?”

Can victory be shared? Can we both enjoy this positive feeling, without the need to contrast that with the sorrow of someone else? While on a smaller scale, it seems that many ARC Raiders players are seeking that same sense of shared achievement. 

The big question is, how long can this last? How long will positivity and cooperation in the community stave off the clip-farmers? How many times will a player be on the wrong end of the social twist before they just become the kind of person to shoot on sight?

Change is par for the course when it comes to what is, essentially, a social dedication game. You need to figure out if the person you are talking to is genuine and how much risk you are willing to take. I just hope the spirit of jolly cooperation lasts just a little while longer.