The second Arc Raiders tech test is officially over. Embark first opened the doors to Tech Test 2 on April 30, before it all wrapped up on Sunday, May 4. While feedback has mostly been positive, there was one thing in particular that everyone loved.
I’m talking about Scrappy, the pet rooster you unlock fairly early on once you get your hideout. The idea of Scrappy isn’t itself new, but the way it’s presented brings a lot of character to a game that’s already full of it, and it’s easy to see why so many players fell in love with it.
Scrappy’s job in Arc Raiders is pretty simple, and should be familiar to anyone who played other extraction shooters. While you’re out on your raids, the rooster goes and finds all kinds of useful items – crafting materials, components and so on.
One of my favourite things to do as soon as I am back is to check and see what Scrappy managed to scavenge. It’s the sort of passive item acquisition that gets you a little more invested in the out-of-run metagame, and helps make it less frustrating when you die and lose everything.
Now, Scrappy can also be upgraded, but the pieces required to get it to reach higher levels are exceedingly rare. I only managed to get it to level 2, but you can take it all the way to level 5: Master Hoarder. With each upgrade, the quality – and quantity – of the items Scrappy finds improves, which makes all kinds of sense.
Out of the thousands who jumped into Tech Test 2 last week, however, only a single player managed to get it all the way to max level. That’s according to developer Embark, who shared a few stats about the test on Twitter.
Players put in over 1.7 million hours, and collectively managed to destroy 7 million Arc enemies across the 4 million rounds they played. The Arc Queen, in particular – the largest and most terrifying AI enemy of them all – was even defeated 58 times, which is pretty surprising because most players would just avoid it.
While we didn’t get a release date for Arc Raiders as many suspected we would by the end of the test, Embark said in a thank you message to players that there’s going to be another test, though the developer didn’t say when we can expect it, and whether it’s going to be more open.
Although the recent tech test was the game’s biggest so far, it still required invites, and so many players have not been able to get in. There’s very likely going to be an open beta-style demo at some point prior to launch.
I’ve been playing a lot of Arc Raiders Tech Test 2 and I can tell you that it reminded me the most of classic PUBG, which I didn’t expect going into it. Even at its current state, it’s an incredibly polished and focused game, so much so that many have asked Embark to just release the current build and launch the game now.
