Let me set the stage. My friend and I are trying to get the crate to the field warehouse, a decent place for loot ARC invaders‘maps. Suddenly another squad appears and we all immediately encourage them to lower their weapons over the microphone. Instead of putting bullets through my shield, this ragtag bunch of players start telling us they’re from Germany and start dancing with us in the darkness of an abandoned factory. This is just one of many ways interaction can take place Go to collegerecent extraction shooting game. When I talk to design director Virgil Watkins in a recent interview, I’m excited to see how the creator creates these moments.
The beauty of ARC Raiders’ social energetic is that it doesn’t necessarily force you to interact with them. You can play without voice chat enabled as you traverse the Rust Belt as a road warrior, just trying to make sure your trusty rooster Scrappy has food. The available emotes are intended to point out the basics, namely one key instruction: “Don’t shoot.” Since ARC Raiders doesn’t try too difficult to get you to cooperate with anyone, I ask Watkins about how the game allows you to experiment with other players.
“You know, we discussed this a lot. Do we factor it into the systems? Do we even enforce it? And I kept saying it was never okay when we really drove these roads too much. It kept coming back to, ‘We’re giving the player the option, we’re giving the player the tools to do these things, but we’re not mandating it,'” Watkins shares with me. While Embark’s recent action extraction game covers the basics in a quick tutorial at the beginning, it doesn’t cover all the social opportunities it can create. Instead, you have to discover a completely different side of the game that may go unnoticed for hours.
This is because you need to enable proximity chat in the game settings, and I highly recommend doing so whether you’re playing solo or with friends in ARC Raiders crossplay. This adds another dimension to meetings as you try to gauge whether you can make a friend or foe in one fell swoop. But what if you prefer to play alone? Watkins talks about how Embark is paying attention to this part of the player base while keeping the stakes intriguing.
He adds that it’s a way to “still use prox VoIP in a fun way, and I’ve even seen people, even here in the studio, use it for role-playing in an individual way. It was very cool to see that happen. And I’m really curious if people will find it interesting at launch.”
ARC Raiders is available now on mobile and desktop computers, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. You can easily get started with our Steam ARC Raiders deck guide. For more from my conversation with Virgil Watkins, learn how Embark might expand Speranza in the future and how one of the game’s coolest features came to be.
