While Escape from Tarkov is the progenitor of extraction shooters, it’s not unfair to say that Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders is currently the golden child of the genre right now. As the genre becomes more competitive with games like Marathon, Arc has been seen as the go-to game for players who want to give the genre a shot.
In the mind of Escape from Tarkov creator Nikita Buyanov, who has just announced his new sci-fi extraction shooter Fragmentary Order, Arc Raiders is the casual gamer’s option for a genre he believes should offer extreme challenge and even pain for its players.
In a rather lengthy interview with GamesBeat to promote his upcoming game, Buyanov explained that he isn’t taking any cues from the success of Arc Raiders for this next project as the game does not offer the same level of challenge he wants to see in the genre.
“It’s an extraction shooter for casual people,” the game developer told the outlet. “It’s not an option for us. We want to have the most painful, most challenging, and most rewarding experience.”
Anyone who has played Escape from Tarkov will know that encountering friendly players is extremely rare, especially compared to the 30% PvE players that populate Arc Raiders games. In Tarkov, it’s usually shoot on sight. It’s PvP first, and encountering a player that not only acts friendly, but actively is friendly is a rarity.
When discussing the push for friendly players in his new game, Buyanov explains that “you can try”, even explaining that “we won’t force people to fight”. With that said, “people will fight, of course”.
“That’s your call,” the developer said when discussing the push for friendly PvE players. “But we’re trying to simulate reality. Tarkov is the same. We simulate reality. But in the future, it will be even richer than that. You’ll have a lot to do, and not just fighting people. You’ll need to survive dynamic events in the location. You might need to work with others to find shelter.”
Obviously, the friendly community for Arc Raiders has done wonders for the game’s popularity, but even then the prominence of PvE was entirely unexpected by the game’s developers. Recently, Bungie even attempted to bring more friendly options to its extraction shooter, Marathon, which resulted in players using the new friendly options to torture other players.
The reality is that Arc Raiders likely is the most casual-friendly extraction shooter around, but that’s not a bad thing. Every genre needs its more casual offerings to survive, and it’s not like Arc is a particularly easy game in the grand scheme of things. Without accessible options, genres simply stay obscure, and Arc has done such a good job at introducing extraction shooters to the wider gaming audience that even Disney wants a slice of the action.
