In case you never watched it, the general premise of the first video
was that while the old titans of the games industry like Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft, et cetera,
have been mostly shoveling out slop for a while now,
there was light at the end of the tunnel because just like what happened in the past
with companies like Atari, people were splintering off and starting fresh.
These new groups were releasing amazing games like Helldivers 2,
and as much as they aren't technically a splinter group, Baldur's Gate 3.
How are things going now? Pretty great, in my opinion. Well, see how I feel when Elder Scrolls 6 comes out,
but for now, I wanna focus on one little company
I didn't mention in that video, Embark Studios.
They're a splinter group from the deeply prolific and rather legendary DICE Studios.
They came out of the gate swinging with the finals in December of 2023.
It's the first game they released, yet has over 140,000 reviews on Steam
with 80% of those being positive. Reading the comments on YouTube of reviews of the game
also shows that the people who liked it really liked it.
The gameplay loop is engaging and innovating. The sound design is crisp and punchy.
The highly destructible environment makes the map feel alive
and they even found a way for people to have fun
when they lose, which is a big hurdle.
Great, a splinter group has a big debut success.
My theory has been backed up, right? Well, yeah, and the finals is great,
but we're not actually here to talk about that. We're here to talk about something
actually much more impactful from Embark, Arc Raiders.
Arc Raiders is a PVPVE extraction shooter game
set in a world where humans were forced underground while the surface was taken over by a bot faction
referred to as Arc. The gameplay loop has you gearing up, going topside,
finding loot, fighting Arc bots and other players,
then extracting back underground, but that wasn't what they originally even wanted.
Arc Raiders was actually supposed to be their first release
with the finals coming up second. Far way through development, however,
they pivoted from a co-op based PVE game
to said PVPVE extraction shooter
and significantly delayed their release. For what?
To become just another Tarkov clone?
No, far from it. It's surprisingly different and is known for getting people
who retired from multiplayer games altogether off of their single player islands,
which is pretty wild considering the brutal losses
extraction shooters are known for. So how did they accomplish this?
First off, they did something different with their PVP,
but to break down the raw beauty of Arc Raiders PVP,
we need to understand it's PVE and to do that,
we need to look back at the game that really popularized the extraction shooter genre escaped from Tarkov.
Tarkov also features dynamic PVP friend or foe mechanics
weaved in with PVE quite heavily in their trailers,
including the original trailer for the game. There are two players originally locked in a fight
who team up to fight scabs, the standard AI in Tarkov instead.
This theme would repeat over and over, over the years in various cinematics,
but as an avid player, it was all but absent
from the gameplay because it was just so unnecessary.
Some people may force it here or there for fun, but most players playing on their main character
or PMC would never experience teaming up
with random other PMCs to accomplish objectives mid-match.
The AI enemies in Tarkov generally referred to as scabs
in most cases are without exaggeration, just poorly coated cannon fodder.
They're not generally all that feared by the player base unless they're just way over tuned some patch.
And even then, they're usually pretty easy to exploit.
Even the more advanced Raiders, Rogues or bosses
all have pretty simple tricks to take them down by abusing shallow pathing and behaviors.
In Arc Raiders, however, the Arc Bots are terrifying.
These are no scabs. Not only are some of them the size of fricked buildings,
but they're also super varied. There's pop drones I like to refer to as banelings
if you ever played StarCraft, they're rolling around. Various spider drones are lurking on the walls
or leaping at you, flying drones or poking away at you, et cetera.
The AI is cunning, far more capable and just kind of a lot to deal with at times.
The time to kill isn't all that short either and it's loud, attracting other bots
and potentially unwanted player attention. They even trained the movement of these bots
based on machine learning, so they feel kind of alive.
It's a pretty serious part of the game. You will be hunted, your ammo and supplies drained,
but surprisingly often, especially when playing solo,
a friendly Raider might come by to bail you out, changing trust and taking on the Arc enemies together.
Embark heavily incentivizes people to put themselves out there, to engage
in emergent player-driven interactions because the Arc are often just too damn hard
to take down on your own. They use difficulty to drive people together.
Now, of course, people do betray each other,
people backstab each other, people exit camp degenerates,
but this all happens much less than you might think
if you've played other similar games and there are reasons for this.
It's not just a random community difference. Embark made this happen.
They made the rewards for PVPing, comparatively lower than in something like Tarkov,
by limiting inventory space and making general loot
plentiful and balancing your risk to reward ratio.
In Tarkov, you have way more storage space
to haul all that loot away. Good loot is much less plentiful
and it's very likely that a lot of the overall loot value
on the map is in the loadouts that players are bringing in,
so you're gonna wanna kill them. You can also pitch your own gear and get it back later
through this system called insurance, taking up the now dead player's gear to risk instead.
There is so much incentive to direct PVP
in Tarkov comparatively. In Ark, the loot is more individualistic.
What matters to you is a little bit less likely to matter to others.
There's also a much longer time to kill, which enables a much higher chance for a reversal,
meaning higher risk for aggressing enemies.
Other players can revive you when you're down, which is just, oh, chef's kiss levels of emergent gameplay.
You can extract while you're down and no longer a threat to others.
You can share extracts. Proximity chat is widely used
and voice maxing is already a thing in the game, which helps shy people.
And the Emoot wheel prominently features a don't shoot button.
Hey, don't shoot. The deep, juicy rewards in Ark Raiders,
especially in solo queue, will quite possibly be found easier
by working with your fellow enemy Raiders.
Even the environment and story strongly promote these ideas.
By all means, it's still a PVP enabled game. If after watching this, you could cuddle up with a care bear,
load up the game and expect sunshine and rainbows from everyone, you're gonna get shot.
It's a competitive world. Survival isn't guaranteed for anyone,
but back at home, in Sparenza, people are generally in this together.
And the real oppressive force of this world
is the arcbots up top, not each other.
I finished my extra dick and I have to admit that she's gonna get away.
Embark doesn't force you to be friendly by any means.
They make sure you're able to kill each other at every opportunity,
but they also made teamwork with strangers a much more reasonable and often logical thing to do
than in the other games. Where by far, the biggest reward
is to just attack everything that moves at all times. I hope the game doesn't entirely lose
this aspect over time, but either way, what an amazing second release.
I can't wait to see what they do next. And while writing this,
they won best multiplayer game at the 2025 game awards.
Arc Raiders! I'd be remiss to not mention Expedition 33,
which just swept, but I haven't had time to play it yet,
so I couldn't really include many details of it in this video,
but it's just another example of an awesome new studio,
just crushing. For those who come after, he doesn't get it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Embark team is super cool.
There's an awesome three-part mini doc on the making of Arc Raiders
on their official YouTube channel. And man, hearing the devs talk with that much passion
is just so exciting. Hearing them talk about how important gameplay and fun is.
Man, it feels like watching the old gaming documentaries from the golden age,
which I used to love, not just some soulless corporate slop,
which feels so common these days. My two favorite parts is first,
when the founder and CEO says, we're seeing productions with over a thousand people.
Are the games themselves better? They're more of them.
They're at higher fidelity, but are they actually better games? How do we move away from productions
that are so large that they're difficult to manage? I enjoyed hearing that
for what is probably obvious reasons at this point.
And then in the second video, their creative director says,
that's why we wanna use gradual destructions on the drones.
You would shoot up a thruster and that disables its ability to fly.
Of course it does. Like it's physics talking back to you.
You can just feel it. These guys care and I'm so here for it, man.
Take my money and maybe take off
because this is the end of Luke week. Thank you for coming along with me.
All of the content this time is pretty long, I think, ideally.
Hopefully this makes up for the super mini gaming video last time.
Man, I watched it in preparation for this video
and I did like it. But yeah, even I was surprised at like,
wow, that was really short. Especially if you take out the like more wind history thing.
It's like, it's not four minutes, man. It's like two minutes.
Hopefully this made up for that. I actually wanted this to be even longer.
Hence the X-Vision 33 thing and multiple other things, but been a little bit too busy trying to fix up mold issue
and my condos. I couldn't really dedicate all of the time to the script that I wanted.
But thanks to all of you for coming along this journey on full plane in general and for Luke week more specifically,
I wouldn't be here without you guys. I have to recognize that.
And thanks to Sammy for dealing with me and making this happen.
I'm not exactly the easiest person to work with on projects like this because my schedule is like wildly chaotic,
but I had a great time doing this. Have a great day, get some sunlight,
get a good night's sleep, and maybe just maybe don't shoot.