I’m very close to saying F it and buying. Been watching guys play to feel it out and love what I’m seeing. The 3P combat looks like Division 2, which I had 1200h+ in and love to this day.
What platform you playing on?
I hate extraction shooters but I fuckin love Arc raiders. Well worth the $40(!) if only to tell the industry "Fuck your pricing." I had an amazing amount of interest in the division, but I hated the "bullet sponginess" of the combat which made me drop it. This feels like it fixes those major issues while taking those great parts of TD and reviving them. It feels like what I wanted from The Division but with a different set of visuals/setting/etc.
How is the solo queue? If the map even adds a team of two it seems like it would be really difficult for someone to overcome. With all 3 players (2 vs 1) at equal levels, it feels like it becomes a game of resource management.
Game is also the very best solo queue experience you can have in a shooter, where many rounds will be you and some strangers looking for fruit. Some rounds I had an all out firefight which kept spilling out further into the map, some rounds you'll be looking out of a window and see 9 solos taking out an enormous ARC together. Solos are always in with only other solos (though it may not seem that way if two guys who decided on proxy chat to team up fuck you up), duos and trios are in one queue but I believe and hope they will change it to duos vs duos, but I kind of like the extra stress of winning a fight against two guys with my brother and having to look around for their third friend.
The proxy chat combined with immaculate sound design is making the social interactions insanely appealing for everyone.
Here's an example of a solo game I had: Looting a random place, looking for rusty gears, nothing special. I hear a muffled voice upstairs and call out, get answered by some guy. He tells me he is upstairs and that someone locked him in a loot room (some rooms need keys) and asked me to get him out. The clock is ticking down, but I think "What would I
actually do" so of course I decide to go looking for him
.
It takes me a solid few minutes, but I can eventually follow the sound of his voice with directional audio, and find the right door. Just as I go to open it, from a dark corner someone pops out and lands a rifle shot in my chest, putting me down to less than half health. I fire a shot back, yelling, while the guy who was stuck in the room is able to land a single shot on the third guy, dropping him, while I'm able to knock him out.
It turns out, he had kidnapped him in that room and planned on waiting till the last minute to kill him and try to get out. Kidnapper was yelling at us as we were killing him "My plan almost worked, you'll be hearing more about me! About more victims! YOU CAN"T STOP M-" as I punched his lights out.
For a split second, when I opened the door and took that initial shot my first thought was "I can't believe i've been betrayed so elaborately" followed by the elation of killing the kidnapper, saving this guy, then getting out of the level together with only 5 seconds left on the clock was just something else that isn't offered in the industry.
Game has been an absolute 10/10 for me.
Great description. Love that. Are the typical shooter WPN classes present like MMRs and snipers or does this title have a different spin on range, mid, and CQ play?
Also, is there any perma-carryover after death like how Hunt does it with unlocked Hunter skins and WPN/item vanity? Or is every match tabula rasa with even vanilla scavenged loot?
Usual spin, but with the "scrapped together by amateur weaponsmiths" flavor you'd expect from the setting. I was initially worried upon seeing the Osprey, a scoped sniper rifle, and just like a sniper in any game it's going to be annoying. However, it does not drop you instantly, takes about 3-4 shots I believe, and needs some set up like a stun trap so that he can plink you efficiently to death.
Weapons are split into Light, Medium, Heavy; with heavy being best against bots, but slower, medium is of course the middle ground, and light is terrible against bots but good against players. The gunfights are very intense, the quality of the animations such as your head snapping back after you've been dinked is visceral, Embark has some incredibly talented people working on those "quiet parts" of a game which gives it that
feel, that
oompf.
Skins (raider only, no weapon skins yet) are kept forever it's much less punishing than games like Hunt, and depending on your backpack(augment) you can have up to 3 "safe" pockets (most have one or two) which come back with you even if you die, so you can stick something good like a blueprint in your butt to keep in case you get killed by a rat at extract.
The very best description I heard was "Tarkov for people who have jobs" but don't let the idea of it being "more casual" turn you off, unless spreadsheets are what you enjoy in games.
How’s the TTK in this? Meaty enough HP for proper firefights or CoD insta-bin?
It's smack dab in the middle, but can be both. If you're fighting guys and you're all rocking single shot ferros, the fight will draw out with even healing in between and more of a positional fight. On the other hand, it could be 6 guys running at eachother with high tier SMGS and shredding eachother. Seems to really hit the sweet spot and the few times i've been tilted was when some dishonorable goblin shoots me in the back while I mind my business. The fights themselves feel very good as a long time shooter player.
I heard the enemy AI is really good, and it's a surprisingly well optimized Unreal Engine 5 game, even running well on older systems.
Tim Sweeny blamed developers for all the crappy performances in UE5 games, and you can't help but believe him. A friend if mine is playing this on a 1080 (1080p monitor too) and says it runs great with mid settings.
How big are the maps? My most anticipated game is Cyberpunk 2, this gives me hope that it won't be a performance disaster.
I've said for a while now that the UE5 issues were lazy devs, and ironically, that was because of Embark's first game FINALS which ran buttery smooth with fully destructible environments. Maps vary in size with the larger ones have a longer timer at 40 minutes, most are 30 for now. They are big enough to not feel like a bunch of empty space uselessly sitting there, but not that you spawn instantly next to someone every single time. There are also staggered spawns, some people will spawn in at the start, some at 28 minutes, some at 25. Latest i got was 17. At that point, a lot of the map is looted, so you have to make a choice on whether to fight people for the shit they took, or just beeline to something specific you need and come back light.
