It seems like the following is indeed interesting, yet I’ve never ever experienced Arc Raiders myself! Have you? ^^
But often, players are just talking. A YouTube video called The Humans of Arc Raiders, inspired by the photographer who interviews strangers in New York City, includes conversations with randomly encountered players. They talk about family struggles, work lives, depression, autism and, in one case, a lung collapse. In one conversation, a heavily armed player in green armour named Poopy candidly asks another raider: "What’s it like having kids, dude?”
When I first jumped into Arc Raiders, I found a dichotomy on the topside, where birds sing and plants thrive among the carcasses of downed machines. The more I wandered around this 1970s-style retro-future setting, the more I bumped into other humans, many of whom offered help, such as medical supplies. Mostly we snuck around and battled robots together. It was tense at times, sometimes scary, but often relaxing.
In one session, I encountered another player with a British accent who was also new to the game. "Have you been killed by another person yet?” he asked me, as we explored a burst concrete dam complex. "Because every person I’ve met has been friendly,” he added. “No one kills each other.”
Source [web-archive]
Having played the game I disagree entirely. People were blood thirsty and pretended to be helpful only to kill before extraction. The DON’T SHOOT emote was used 100% of the time before they shot me in the face.
0/10 don’t recommend.
The game puts you in different lobbies depending on your play style. Care bears get matched with other care bears. Murder bears get matched with other murder bears. If you are finding yourself only getting matched with murder bears, examine your play style.
murder bearsintensive Care Bears
Most of my experience has been good and friendly but there are certain maps that murderers tend to frequent. Stella mons has been where I’ve found most player killers. Overall though, people chat and team up successfully all the time
Sure, but it has never been as kumbaya cooperative as described in this article. People can and do meet up cooperatively but it is not the norm.
I bet the big difference is time. When do you play vs the journalist?
8pm central time vs 8am central time, vs 3am central time probably bring in very different people.
Kinda like how a bar or pub shifts during a day.
That’s the fun thing, I don’t, because my game experience was horrible and I’d rather play games that I can enjoy in the time that I have to do that.
In Jedi Outcast and Academy having your saber off meant that you were currently chatting or AFK. In good servers you’d get banned for killing someone who had their saber off.
To me it seems like any kind of communication in multiplayer games has gotten less and less over the years. Used to be pretty common to just talk about random stuff with random people in games like CS, DayZ and even Overwatch years ago, but in recent years, I hardly remember any instances of people using voice chat at all, let alone using it to say anything positive. So if this is true and common for Arc Raiders, which I haven’t played, it seems to be a positive outlier. Also curious about other people’s experience.
My experience has been the adoption of Discord for communication in game has been a negative factor in the social aspects of gaming. Before, games needed to implement their own comms, which would encourage players to communicate as part of the game experience. But now it’s expected that you’d talk on discord instead, so there’s less need for games to be a social experience.
Speaking as someone who’s only been playing ARC Raiders for about a week, this does happen pretty often. The game uses Aggression Based Matchmaking, so there is still PVP if you want it. But if you want to be friendly, team up and chat with randoms you meet, and generally coexist with fellow players, it’s totally doable and actually happens fairly often.
Bumped into a guy on the map Blue Gate in a residential area. He was in a rush to get somewhere, but when I told him I was new to the game he stopped and gave me a couple blueprints for guns and a few tips for the map we were on.
I used to be very active in overwatch voice chat from 2017-2021. Made some friends that way. But now I don’t play much any more since ow2, but I drop in now and then. I don’t ever speak on voice, and I usually just mute it tbh. It used to be fun and I would block/ignore the toxic players, which was worthwhile to find good people to make friends with. But now it’s only exclusively used to flame people so it’s just not worth even opening. I suppose it’s a self-fuelling downward spiral - the more negative it gets, the more people only use it for negativity, and legit users are pushed out.
I love that game exactly because of this, the random encounters, the crazy people, the funny ones, the awkward ones, when in the right lobby it’s such an interesting social experience
I wish I could experience multiplayer games like this. Bad performance due to my vision would likely frustrate others playing with me.
Hell, I wish more games just had humanity. It might be due to me being antiwar, but when playing MMOs (whose MO is pretty much always ‘kill each other’ PVP) I wish folk were not so quick to kill, especially not when the kill isn’t imperative. Face it, some of the best ever moments in gaming are when folk have the option to kill each other and dont. A shred of humanism.
Universal signs in COD existed to plead for mercy, such as switching to a knife and looking away. In Black Ops II there’s a rave room in a map and several players spent a minute bobbing their characters around until someone else came and mowed the other team down. One time in Battlefield I spent the majority of a game (no mic mind you) chilling on a roof with half a dozen players from two teams. I came to multiplayer FPS games for the combat, stayed for the randoms I met.
Honestly Arc Raiders is (or can be) more about collecting stuff while staying alive than about killing stuff. Evading 100% of the fights is a totally valid play style. So your vision problems might not be as big a deal in this game as you would expect.
Other guy: “Grab the supplies”
Me: “Where are they?”
Other guy: “Over there”
Me: “Where is ‘there’?”
I know next to nothing about Arc Raiders, so I may be assuming wrong. It’s not just about PvP, it’s about how fast-paced the game play is. I can bumble through a game of Deep Rock Galactic with friends because it’s (I imagine) slower paced and everyone is working on the same goal. My friends are also patient enough to deal with my issues.
