about a playtest (ARC Raiders)

Prologue

nowadays i'd say it's pretty difficult to find a large game developer that actively cares about their fans and makes truly incredible games. 

to me when I think incredible video game developer, in both a sense that their games are good and their constant communication and interaction with their community is like no other that I know of, I think of Embark Studios. they developed THE FINALS, a game which I've spent an insane amount of time playing within the past few months. It's incredibly addicting and like no other FPS I've played, its easily one of my favorite games of all time at this point and I really don't say that lightly. THE FINALS is a topic for another day, its a game I could talk about to great lengths (which I'm planning to do on youtube so look forward to that!) 

today though I want to discuss their upcoming game, ARC Raiders, known as Project Pioneer in early development this was meant to be Embark's first game prior to THE FINALS (known as project discovery in early development). Envisioned as a PVE shooter in a similar vein to something like Borderlands. Eventually priority was placed on THE FINALS and made its way to the public in 2023 while ARC Raiders went under some core changes during that time. That's when the decision was made to turn it into a PVPVE extraction shooter, leading us into the first topic. 

Main Points

I was lucky enough to get early access to the 2nd playtest for the game, I had 5 whole days to play with it and after a good amount of time put into it I have truly enjoyed every moment of it. for a simple playtest of a game that's probably barely out of alpha, the game feels great, refined, and knowing what it wants to be, a feat hard to achieve for most games today which feels souless and copies of one another. it's a great strength that the developers play into, seen with THE FINALS and just how unique of a concept it is compared to any other FPS game on the market. except that while THE FINALS does this for FPS games, ARC Raiders does this for extraction shooters. 

when I think of extraction shooters, my mind instantly turns to Escape from Tarkov, or hell even Call of Duty's DMZ (a game which I also invested a lot of time in). It's a hard genre to figure out, being incredibly difficult to have a sizable player base due to how intense things can be. there are stakes larger than simply dying and trying again. you lose progress when you die, and to many that can immediately turn people off this genre of game. ARC Raiders, while also sharing this trait of losing progress when you die, feels a lot more forgiving. You have plenty of opportunities to be rescued by teammates or plenty of time to crawl away from danger and towards an extraction point if need be. its a great way that keeps hope, makes the game tense and plays to its benefit. there's also the specticle of it all, despite doing the classic trope of a post apocalyptic world blah blah blah, the robots or ARC are a great twist as well as a great threat while adding incredible amounts of specticle and making the game stick out when most other games of the genre maintain a realistic mil-sim aesthetic. it's a fresh departure and feels grounded, makes sense within the world, and just is so cool.

the visuals look fantastic, I played this on a original launch PS5 and the game looked good and ran smooth. a few visual bugs here and there but for the most part it looked spectacular, running Unreal Engine 5 like THE FINALS. Embark has truly done a spectacular job in terms of optimizing their games on UE5, which is well known for causing plenty of issues with performance. Embark however has made it work, and work well, especially in THE FINALS, adding 120fps support in Season 5 for current-gen consoles while maintaining the visuals to look just as good as in 60fps. also managing to port it to PS4 (kind of crazy honestly for such an intensive game like that). So ARC Raiders has been pretty rock solid in both visuals and performance, maintaining a smooth 60 frames per second and looking spectacular. 

a few issues of mine have to do with a few of the ARC being kind of unfair and extremely punishing at some points, for the most part smaller ARC are perfectly fine to manage, you learn their patterns and movement quickly and its best to equip certain weapons to take them down like heavy rifles. however a few such as the rocketeer which is pretty prevalent in the game can be insane to take down, they manage to kill you within 2 hits which is terrible for when lets say you're trying to extract and there's little to no cover. for such a relatively common ARC it feels incredibly punishing and sucks when youre struck down. fortunately the games still far from coming out yet and there's plenty of time to fix things up and make them a lot better, and I'm more than confident that Embark can balance things out and make it fun and challenging, but fair to everyone. 

Long story short...

ARC Raiders is phenomenal, feeling complete for the most part with the exception of a few minor things but overall feeling like a great addition to the difficult extraction shooter market. It's definitely worth mentioning that, unlike THE FINALS, ARC Raiders WILL be a paid game but priced less than the industry standard of 70 dollars (or its looking like 80 now lmao) and probably will be 40 bucks. For what you're getting its pretty great, but if you want to try it for yourself go ahead and make yourself an Embark ID at id.embark.games and sign up for a playtest and give it a go. At worst you'll lose half an hour not liking the game but I think that this is truly something special and worth experiencing if you can.