Somehow, Arc Raiders has managed to attract a community of people who are not completely cutthroat. In fact, sometimes they are just wonderful. No one is more impressed than developer Embark Studios, as the team is more bloodthirsty than us as a whole.
Robert Sammelin, Art Director at Embark, talked about how great it is to interact with Arc Raiders players. PCGamer. “I think internally we were hoping that we could achieve this balance where people were almost apprehensive about how they would interact with other people,” he explained, “that there was this tension, this underlying threat, but also the greater external threat from the arcs would perhaps lead to these kinds of cooperative scenarios.”
This is, of course, very nice. Arc Raiders encourages no-compromise because you can loot dead players and take whatever they've picked up. So you can watch someone collect something, then take it out and return the prize to Speranza. But people don't do it as often as you might think, and it's based on statistics, not anecdotal evidence.
“We got some data on how many people the other player had lost, and it was surprisingly low,” states Sammelin. “But there are also completely different impressions from playing as part of a team or alone. I think it also opens up a completely different experience depending on how you choose to engage with the game.”
Perhaps killer robots are the X-factor here? Or maybe we're not as bad as most multiplayer lobbies would have you believe. Arc Raiders has proven one thing so far: you don't need toxicity to succeed, and that's more valuable than any loot.
