Back in 2022, ARC Raiders revealed itself as a co-op shooter with stylishly post-apocalyptic guerillas fighting robotic attackers that rained from the sky onto their ruined world. We haven't heard much since. Now, developer Embark Studios is back, telling us that two years of development have refined its free to play co-op shooter into a PvPvE extraction shooter instead. It's still a game where teams of scavengers hit the surface world hunting for the things their underground colonies need amid robotic occupation… but now they're competing with any other scavengers that get in their way.
Also new: ARC Raiders will release in 2025 with a $40 price tag.
"Years back we announced [ARC Raiders] as a co-op only game," said executive producer Aleksander Grondal. "But since, through extensive playtesting and internal evaluation, we evolved it into a PvPvE action survival shooter, an evolution that for us surfaced the best version of what this game could become."
That seemed clear from the way the developers spoke about it, and from internal playtest videos that I saw during a live event. Machines were an omnipresent threat to a roving trio of raiders. Some could be taken out by quick coordinated attacks, like flocks of smaller drones, or were best avoided, like heavier fliers armed with rockets. Others were larger, more vicious multi-limbed crawlers that groaned out mechanical roars and which we only saw attacked via ambush tactics. Other teams of scavengers were the truly surprising threat—either glimpsed briefly in the distance, encountered in an interior where both parties were surprised, or spotted as an ambush at an extraction point.
"This is a game that lives on tension," said chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg, "where you have to be on your toes. Listen to the world around you in moments of silence." Strandberg's statement really hit home with what I saw of ARC Raiders, which was very distinctly lacking in heavy background music, instead favoring environmental noises like wind, trees, water, footsteps, and the noises of characters cracking open boxes with tools.
There was space for all that noise, too, and fights between both players and machines are intended to be spaced out. "The game needs to have the room to build tension properly," said Grondal, "and that means the pacing between interactions of other players and the AI needs to have enough space for you to feel that."
The enemies previewed had very distinct sounds to them as well: Fliers had a precise quadcopter buzzing and signal beeping, while rolling explosive bombs had a rotary whine and four-legged hunting walkers had a grinding groan and whir. If the ARC Raiders delivers on this promise, it's definitely the kind of experience where veterans will recognize and hunt enemies based on the sounds of individual weapons and the weight of footsteps.
It will at least make ARC Raiders stand out when compared to many other modern multiplayer shooters, which are often going louder, faster, and more in sync with a musical score. Strandberg and Grondal were clear that Embark wants ARC Raiders to be a slower and more decisive game – one with consequential choices in how you play and what your setup was beyond the precise details of your gun mods. (Though, I have to say, there was definitely a big page full of gun mods.)
Strandberg in particular said that the studio's goal was to make it a "rich sandbox of gadgets and tools beyond your military shooter" while still being "grounded" and "tactile." That seemed at least partially evident in how characters jogged around the world and did heavy vaults over obstacles while laden with equipment. It was also clear in the gadgets they used in footage: One clip showed a player with a kind of grappling gun that pulled them to the upper window of a building, while another showed a player hooking to some kind of stationary zipline.
In another fight a player first deployed a smoke grenade to put cover between himself and an ARC machine walker, then placed a land mine nearby before continuing to run… only to throw a "lure grenade" to the mine's location once a little further away. The robots are clearly tough, though—only after repeating the trick a second time did it go down, and that was all the grenades the player seemed to have.
The players of the brief gameplay demo escaped their jaunt to the surface via a subway stop—after some tense cat-and-mouse gunplay with another team camping the extraction site. Their "time on surface" clocks read 11 minutes, 39 seconds as the loot screen rolled. They didn't yet know exactly how many people would be in a match, but they did say that crossplay was intended and that ongoing matches currently backfilled new teams as older ones extracted.
Grondal said that ARC Raiders should release with a "robust" live service experience, including regular free updates post-launch.
As to how the team felt about the switch from a focus on co-op to the PvP element being front and center? "We kept the good parts, and that was 100% the right decision," said Grondal, "and the game is so much better for it."
