Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios is bowing to the pacifists and trialing a PvE mode in their extraction shooter. If you play between October 13th and 20th, you’ll be able to flick a toggle that means you load either into the traditional world of Arc Raiders, where human players vie for the valuable scraps left behind in a ruined world watched over by killer robots, or a slightly safer version where the machines are still deadly but the humans can’t hurt you.
“We’re seeing a large and growing group of Raiders who come to the Rust Belt for the co-op and the ARC, not fighting with other Raiders,” Embark say in the post announcing the trial. “That group has become a core part of our community, so it’s important we learn how to support them properly rather than leave them working around the game.”
To back this up, the studio share some data they’ve collected, showing that there are now more players that play only friendly co-op and never attack other humans than the merciless pure PvP bunch. Apparently the PvP group has remained at a stable 34% since the game’s launch, but the number of mixed players, who spend most their time being affable members of the post-apocalypse society but occasionally dabble in wanton homicide, has shrunk, with most opting to become full-time peaceniks.
Part of the core design was the risk that maybe another raider could turn on you. The devs continuously hammered home that this was a core part of the game which couldn’t be changed and would result in a lesser game. So was that a lie or is the PvE mode going to be a fundamentally worse game?
Each PvE only match is going to be a foot race to see who gets to the loot and extract first with zero risk; the bots pose so little danger that you could run around with an empty loadout and not worry about losing anything. Conversely, each PvP enabled lobby is going to be a deathmatch with no looting because you have nowhere else to use your weapon loadouts and you have the PvE mode for looting.
Looting with no risk gets super boring super fast; unless they provide some steep incentives for NOT queueing up in PvE only, this game is going to fall flat on its face.