Arc Raiders Made Me Care About Extraction Shooters Again
I bounced off Tarkov like three times. Hunt Showdown scared me. The whole extraction shooter thing always felt like it was designed for people who have way more patience and free time than I do. Then Arc Raiders came out and now I have 40 hours in it. What happened.
Embark Studios dropped this thing on October 30th and it just. Worked. Four million copies sold in under two weeks. 700,000 concurrent players across all platforms. Steam alone peaked at like 460k which is genuinely insane numbers for a new IP in a pretty niche genre
The setting is sick I wont lie. Post apocalyptic Italy overrun by killer robots. You live underground in a city called Toledo and go “topside” to scavenge stuff. The robots are called ARCs and they will absolutely wreck you if youre not paying attention. Its atmospheric in a way that extraction shooters usually arent? Like theres actual world building here not just “loot stuff and try not to die.”
But the thing that actually got me hooked is the matchmaking. When you queue solo the game tries to put you against other solo players. Its not guaranteed but it happens enough that youre not constantly getting demolished by coordinated three stacks with 500 hours each. Someone on reddit described it as “The Last of Us mmorpg where clickers are robots” and yeah thats pretty much it.
The community unlocked the new Stella Montis map in like 38 hours btw. Through donations. Embark had to BUFF the requirements because people were being too generous. When has that ever happened. Usually these community events drag on forever because nobody participates. Arc Raiders players are just built different apparently.
𝕏 POST EMBED
Arc Raiders official: “This past weekend we reached over 700,000 concurrent Raiders on the surface!”
Now theres drama about AI voice stuff. Embark uses text to speech for some NPC callouts and people got upset. They say voice actors were hired and the TTS is in their contracts but the optics arent great. Nexons CEO said something about every game company using AI now which. Not the best thing to say publicly my dude.
But whatever. The game itself is good. Really good actually. Third person works great for this type of game, the gunplay feels weighty without being clunky, $40 is a reasonable price point. Shroud said hed rather see it win game of the year over some other stuff and I kinda get it. This came out of nowhere and just worked.
Its beating Battlefield 6 on Steam charts sometimes. BATTLEFIELD. The biggest shooter launch of the year. An extraction game from the studio that made The Finals is competing with a franchise thats been around for 20 years. What a weird time for games.
Anyway if youve ever been curious about extraction shooters but scared off by Tarkov this is probably the one to try. Its hard but not mean about it. Punishing but fair. All the tension without the “I want to uninstall” rage.
See you topside I guess. Dont shoot me im just trying to extract.
