A few of my early encounters in classic PUBG are forever etched into my memory. There’s a folder of recordings I still keep that’s full of my most exciting, terrifying and confusing moments across years of its evolution.
There’s never been a multiplayer game – battle royale or otherwise – that managed to come close to those heady days of early access PUBG. I am not saying Arc Raiders is the next PUBG but, damn, if doesn’t have a strong facsimile of it.
I had a chance to play Arc Raiders for three days at recent preview event. This is, more or less, the same Tech Test 2 build most of you will be playing starting April 30. Spacing out the game’s tests over months ended up being the right call on the part of Embark, the game’s developer. Every time it comes back, you can see how much has changed and evolved.
That event was my first time playing the game, but I’ve been following it here and there, so I knew, roughly, what I signed up for. Despite my PUBG comparisons, Arc Raiders is not a battle royale game, it’s an extraction shooter.
Yes, that means dying equals permanent loss of gear, weapons, and whatever else you came into the round with – or found – hoping to bring out. The general flow should be familiar to anyone even the slightest bit aware of the genre. But this isn’t just another one of those, there’s a lot here worth highlighting.
Your character, for instance, may lose everything upon death, but if you spent a bit of time opening crates, taking potshots, crafting and surveying a few areas, you’re going to end the round with some nice XP. That does not go away, and can be spent on persistent upgrades to your character that improve everything from the stamina cost of your actions, to how loud you are when rummaging through drawers.
There’s a lot more there, and I waffle on about it in my preview of Tech Test 2. This piece, however, is about the game’s relation to PUBG.
If I could sum up why PUBG managed to consistently produce memorable moments, I would say it all had to do with scarcity. Generally speaking, the less of something you find, the more value it’s going to hold. When you land on a machete and the player next to you on a shotgun, you’re forced to outsmart them if you’re going to survive. If you manage to kill them, the high you get from that will stay with you.
The same thing goes for the rest of the game’s flow. If you have no way of seeing where other players may be hiding, the best way to find out is to investigate – which runs the risk of revealing yourself to others. Someone with a nice and cozy high ground may not actually have the equipment that could take advantage of that, which is incidentally just the thing the player they’re shooting at can exploit.
This is what I love about it; scarcity of information and tools forces you to find a way to make things work – it creates a certain framework for your behaviour. If you hide in a bathroom for much of the game, you’re choosing the less risky option that scarcity has presented you with. If you constantly feel like you’re at a disadvantage; that you could use better armour or more ammo etc., it’s working as intended.
You’re not going to be hiding in bathrooms much in Arc Raiders, but the longer you spend roaming its world, the more that feeling of uneasiness will become your friend.
This is a game with an exceptional rarity of weapon sights, yet it demands you engage with players at distances often suited for scoped rifles. You can choose not to engage – there’s even a mechanic that alerts you that a player just died nearby, but if you decide you want a piece of that action, you’re going to have to rely a lot on your eyes and ears be successful.
The speed and agility of your character won’t allow for Apex Legends-style moments where you’re sliding and jumping around to escape a losing battle, or surprising a group of players with a fully-charged Ult. Pulling that off here requires patience, planning and a little bit of skill. The game doesn’t help you win fights, but it offers a box of tools, and audiovisual cues that you can make work in your favour.
So much of that reminded me of the early days of PUBG, when finding a weapon and some basic armour upped your chance of survival tenfold. I love scarcity in these sorts of games, and Arc Raiders does it well. It also doesn’t hurt that having a shot whiz by you is just as loud and terrifying.
For my OG PUBG friends; those of us who never quite found a game that could come close to replicating that, you absolutely need to try this. Anyone can get into this test – even on consoles, so there’s really no reason not to give it a shot if any of that sounds intriguing.
