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.
The game was initially planned as a COOP only game, so no big surprise. The game sadly got basically “culture war´d” by a shitload of toxic people. A lot of them were not even playing the game. They always tried to create a lot of friction in the player base, but they eventually left and got bored and moved on.
The biggest problem the game has that it has basicall no “endgame” content. Engaging the largest Arcs is not worth it and the game needs more complex content that maybe goes a bit into the direction of dungeons of Destiny 2 or at the very least some of the more complex public events.