ARC Raiders’ immersion is powerful enough to pull players in, but it’s also the reason they can’t agree on how the game is meant to be played.
For some players, ARC Raiders is fine the way it is as a PvPvE game, but others would prefer if it did away with PvP entirely. A PvE-only mode has been one of the extraction shooter’s most commonly requested features since launch, and it’s difficult not to see the game’s immersion as playing a major part in that. If ARC Raiders wasn’t such an immersive experience, the cry for a PvE-only mode wouldn’t be as loud as it is, and it might not even exist at all.
ARC Raiders‘ Best Feature Is Its Immersion
Even before anything has happened during a round in ARC Raiders, it’s easy to become lost in its world. Upon heading into the Dam Battlegrounds for the first time, players are greeted by a silence that is almost deafening and the subsequent tension that comes as a direct result of that silence. There’s no telling when shots might ring out, or when a nearby Wasp might chirp at the sight of a Raider. It isn’t long before mysterious explosions sound off in the distance, and ARCs that are five and ten times larger than a human being can be heard stomping around their patrol routes. All of this plays into ARC Raiders‘ immersion.
Even ahead of its launch, ARC Raiders was already being acknowledged as a deeply immersive experience by those who participated in various tests of the game. A deep-dive analysis shared on Reddit by kimblarsen showed why ARC Raiders‘ immersion stands out so much in comparison to other shooters. The analysis, which was based on 130 community survey responses from Tech Test 2, showed players pointed to the game’s „sound and world design, weather, and responsive AI“ as some of the main reasons the world feels „alive, dangerous, and unforgettable.“ Of course, with the survey being done ahead of ARC Raiders‘ release, many comments in the thread expressed doubt that the game could actually be as immersive as it sounds.
However, once the extraction shooter launched, players began to notice that it was, in fact, one of the more immersive games out there. Posts like this one from Reddit user Evo_8 discuss how ARC Raiders‘ machines feel like real robots, and that’s a large part of what makes them so frightening. Embark Studios even went on to affirm that sentiment in Episode 3 of its Evolution of ARC Raiders docuseries, where it detailed its process behind making the ARCs mimic the behavior of actual robots.
