LightBeam ARC Raiders Review

It's pretty much my "botw" of extraction shooters. I used to think that the genre was oversaturated, I thought that a lot of studios just jumped on a glimpse of trend because they feared they would miss on the new "battleroyale craze" And I was somewhat right. Things like The Cycle Frontier and stuff, while not bad, just couldn't do something really meaningful or interesting enough .... and I thought I disliked that genre. Until Arc Raiders changed my mind. And it did it thank to complete immersion. They made the genre shine and playing this, I thought "alright, that's how it can be this good". I can't stress this enough, but the ARC enemies are just unbelievably realistic, they're a constant threat. While I could somewhat enjoy games like Arena Breakout, or even Delta Force Extraction mode to an extent, I just couldn't get immersed into a world where you could only meet real humans, or AI that was obviously dumb and just filler. Basically, those games make it really obvious that you're just here to complete an objective, that you're playing a video game. It's very hard to explain what is immersion, but Arc Raiders is a masterclass. The sound design, the ARC enemies, the beauty of the game, the constant threat of potentially meeting other players that might or might not be friendly (usually they aren't ... alright maybe I'm not either), the movement's fluidity and realism. People who wish that there wasn't any PvE, or want a PvE-only mode, are missing the point. And that's coming from someone who really wanted that PvE looter shooter game, I do understand how the stress can't be bearable for too long. That's genuinely the reason I'm not playing this 24/7, I just can't bear that stress for that long. But it's so good, just like Breath of the Wild, it made me feel things I thought I couldn't feel again, that I was too experienced to have that sense of wonder, excitement, stress. Not only that, but they seem to be very understanding of the community. One of my major issues with the game was the store, and the items there being pretty expensive, but they've already slashed the price and starting reimbursing people who bought skins. I can only think of Splitgate 2 that did that exact same thing (but the game turned out very differently, that's a whole other story tho). People also started to complain about duo queues : if you play with only one friend, you could meet with trios and it would feel frustrating. They secretely enabled a priority queue for duos, and monitored how it worked, then they announced what they did. What Embark is doing, isn't making promises before taking steps, they're actually addressing before making any announcement so that you don't have to hold your breath, or hope that it works out, because it already does. AI usage has only been a point for moralists who have no interest for the medium. AI is a tool, and Embark has engaged professional voice actors to develop a bank of voices that they could use for their own work. People have been compensated for that, they were willing to. And Embark has been able to greatly accelerate the game's development thanks to this smart "shortcut". Dialogues aren't THAT important, honestly I didn't even know they were AI, it's logical since they used them in The Finals, but even for The Finals I never noticed until I had the information. Arc Raiders was developed in a pretty respectable timeframe for a game of that scale, by a AA game studio, and using AI voices has clearly helped, for games like hero shooters, voice acting is usually a pretty slow process. You have every right to not like it, it's just not for everyone. But you have to try it, you have to give this game some of your interest, if you aren't : you are doing something wrong.