3 years after its reveal, Arc Raiders reemerges as a completely different game

By Tomas Franzese Published August 20, 2024

When Arc Raiders was first announced at the 2021 Game Awards, it was a free-to-play co-operative shooter. That’s changed.

It’s not unheard of for games to change direction after they are announced, with Fortnite’s transition from its Save the World mode to a battle royale during early access being one of the most prominent examples. Still, those looking forward to Arc Raiders should know that what they will be getting when the game launches next year is not what was originally shown off.

At Gamescom Opening Night Live, Embark affirmed that Arc Raiders will now be a premium-priced PvPvE extraction shooter. While the world it inhabits is the same, the intrinsic gameplay loop players experience will be different. Ahead of this announcement, I got a hands-off look at the newly retooled version of Arc Raiders in action. Although the drastic shift from what was originally promised is concerning, Arc Raiders does look like it could be a tense take on the extraction shooter.

The one thing that developer Embark is adamant has stayed the same about Arc Raiders is its world. It’s set on Earth hundreds of years in the future, where the surface is desolate due to an ecological collapse. People are crowded into underground cities, but are struggling to acquire resources. Players must venture out into these wastelands as Raiders looking for loot to bring home. While that premise would have fit in a straight-up cooperative shooter, it works quite well for an extraction shooter too. The world also has a colorful, sci-fi look, even if Embark still wants to keep it gritty and grounded.

While the first trailer for Arc Raiders featured some bombastic shootouts, the gameplay footage I saw felt much more slowly paced. If you’ve played an extraction shooter like Escape from Tarkov before, you’ll recognize the basics of Arc Raiders‘ new gameplay loop. Players slowly survey the surface of Earth for loot while also completing personal quests. There are AI-controlled enemies — rogue machines, in this case — populating the wasteland. Players and their crew will also need to look out for other players, as they won’t hesitate to kill them and steal their loot.

We feel pretty strongly that we kept the good parts.

Even though you won’t lose your specific character or loot placed in your “safe pocket,” anything else you collected will be gone forever, adding a high-risk, high-reward compenent to play. Embark did say during the presentation that it doesn’t want to stonewall players’ progression if they die, though, so you can expect some forms of meta-progression to still work upon death. While that’s a familiar gameplay loop, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal believes the transition from co-op shooter to extraction shooter allowed Embark to home in on the true fun of Arc Raiders.

“The game that we originally built was a game that had a lot of interesting promise, a lot of good things about it. At the end of the day, the thing wasn’t really as fun as we would want it,” Grøndal tells Digital Trends. “We were looking for solutions to how we could bring what we had into something that we felt was more interesting and fun. We kept the best components from the game that we built, namely the setting, a lot of stuff in the AI, and the world. We wanted to keep the good parts, and then we added player versus player, which was always supposed to be part of the Arc Raiders world. It was just that we put that front and center now together with that.

“We feel pretty strongly that we kept the good parts and that it was 100% the right decision to go and do that change, and the game is so much better for it.”

Another decision Embark believes it made for the benefit of Arc Raiders is to make it a premium live service release rather than a free-to-play one. It will retail for $40. Helldivers 2 found success at that price point, so it’s very possible that Arc Raiders can do so as well. “For free-to-play games, they need to strike a careful balance between providing engaging content and encouraging players to make purchases,” Grøndal said. “For Arc Raiders, this shift will allow us to focus more on the engagement and fun, and will impact some choices with regard to how the game evolves over time.”

Arc Raiders is a very different game from when it was first revealed, but I was impressed with how confidently Grøndal stuck by these major changes to its gameplay genre and release structure. Embark’s other multiplayer game The Finals is a blast, and the gameplay of Arc Raiders I saw looks similarly engaging. As such, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in that they made the right calls for Arc Raiders. Of course, I’ll need to go hands-on with it eventually to confirm that.

Arc Raiders launches on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S in 2025. We’ll finally be able to give this new version of Arc Raiders a try when a public tech test takes places on Steam between October 24 and 27.