As far as extraction shooters go, Arc Raiders is by far the most friendly. Compared to Bungie’s Marathon, where players are actively finding new ways to torture one another, Embark’s offering largely sees players working together, which came as a huge surprise to the game’s developers.

While the game was originally designed with more PvP in mind, the Arc Raiders community has banded together in unexpected ways. Additionally, while many online games suffer from a sporadic use of voice chat in-game, Arc Raiders’ community prominently makes use of online communications.

Revealed by Embark in a slew of figures to The Guardian, 95% of active Arc Raiders players are making use of the game’s proximity chat feature to talk with others. While some use the feature to tell others to leave them alone, some use it to actively work together, and others use it to beg for their lives after failing to PvP a rival crew.

As players are leaning towards co-operation instead of hostility by and large, Embark is balancing the game towards team-ups. In fact, the studio has noticed that players are extremely quick to work together with huge boss fights like the Matriarch causing players to work together seconds after spotting each other.

“In an instant—like literally in less than 30 seconds—everyone on that server stopped shooting each other and faced the bigger challenge together,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told the outlet. “And I hadn’t really anticipated the fact that every single one would cooperate that easily in a 30-second time-frame.”

Embark revealed that just 30% of players can be classed as predominantly PvP players, but also 30% of players are predominantly focused. As for the remaining 40% of players, those are players that are more likely to be reactive, shifting between PvP and PvE as depending on the situation. As Embark puts it, they’re in the “why not both” camp.

Grøndal says that the prominence of PvE in Arc Raiders “caught us a little bit by surprise”, adding that the team is “pleasantly surprised, just to be clear”. The executive producer explains that the aesthetic and lore of the extraction shooter does make players want to work together, adding that the team wants to “instil hope in the player”, and PvE is part of that.

As the game continues to evolve with major new updates, Embark has expressed a desire to continue to foster PvE players. With new social features planned for the future—such as a Destiny-like social hub and even the introduction of player trading—it’s clear that the studio is looking to support PvE and the friendly community long into the future.