ARC Raiders

Gave it a go on Saturday, ended up playing for 5 hours straight. Very nice introduction to the extraction genre, especially since I have mostly fallen off of PvP games. Ended up preordering because I definitely want to keep playing.
 
Bit of both solo and squad. Concur with your experience actually, pvp aspect was wildly unbalanced. With every encounter they just seemed to be OP .... one shot highly geared which should not have been possible, just ruined it.
Perhaps these hardcore players encountered are veterans from the full test server experience held a while ago. They would then know how best to kit up and best strategies for taking out fellow humans.

I think only by day three of this server slam event did we realize we needed to upgrade weapons and items more, and I only realized how much junk could be sold off to get currency to use for said upgrades.

Running on poverty spec equipment builds definitely decreases ones survival chances, but also the mindset and strategy going into each deployment needs to be a focused one. Hesitation gets one killed, but so does being too eager to engage in PvP (when you don't know the full threat a seemingly weaker party or individual might represent).
 
Our group of 3 did pretty well overall and we enjoyed the free weekend.

What I dislike about the game:

Wokeness vibes
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EU latency against enemy snipers sucks as a few times I was peek-sniped by and enemy behind a pillar where his bullet would hit me while he's already back behind his pillar and I behind mine.

What I like about the game:

Possible danger around every corner.
Very well optimized and good looking graphics.
 
Our group of 3 did pretty well overall and we enjoyed the free weekend.
<snip>
EU latency against enemy snipers sucks as a few times I was peek-sniped by and enemy behind a pillar where his bullet would hit me while he's already back behind his pillar and I behind mine.
<snip>
How did you find close up combat? Our group didn't play together consistently enough and the few encounters we did have we got wiped, and I can only wonder if it was ping to blame with two of us being ZA based and the third friend being EU based.

We needed more time to get used to the combat and we just weren't online at the same time enough to get in that practice time.

I'm wondering how successful as a strategy it might be for some missions where the group goes in purely trying to scavenge and avoid conflict, on such missions don't go in too geared up as you wouldn't want to lose too much if dying, but if one gets into PvP skirmishes the team might be doomed to get the short end of the stick due to being out-gunned.

Then in other missions one goes in fully kitted out and looking for a fight, winning PvP encounters should yield a lot of loot from the bested players. Of course this is going to be a lottery in and of itself because there is always going to be a better skilled and equipped enemy team that one might encounter from time to time (if not more often than not!).

In terms of wokeness, one of our friends was messing around with his characters look 😅

1761171714424.png
 
How did you find close up combat? Our group didn't play together consistently enough and the few encounters we did have we got wiped, and I can only wonder if it was ping to blame with two of us being ZA based and the third friend being EU based.

We needed more time to get used to the combat and we just weren't online at the same time enough to get in that practice time.

I'm wondering how successful as a strategy it might be for some missions where the group goes in purely trying to scavenge and avoid conflict, on such missions don't go in too geared up as you wouldn't want to lose too much if dying, but if one gets into PvP skirmishes the team might be doomed to get the short end of the stick due to being out-gunned.

Then in other missions one goes in fully kitted out and looking for a fight, winning PvP encounters should yield a lot of loot from the bested players. Of course this is going to be a lottery in and of itself because there is always going to be a better skilled and equipped enemy team that one might encounter from time to time (if not more often than not!).

In terms of wokeness, one of our friends was messing around with his characters look 😅

Fights where one could flank or catch the enemy off-guard in buildings / close-up, we won most of the time. (We have some very sneaky players too)

Encounters from far away (sniper on a rooftop or fighting from behind cover) we lost for the most part. They would almost always hit first.

I don't see us getting SA servers, so one will have to adapt your strategy to engage fights wisely considering your latency disadvantage.
Using grenades and other "Quick slot items" is forgotten by most as the vast majority of players just shoot, so there's some low-hanging fruit things one can do to be "better than the average".
 
How did you find close up combat? Our group didn't play together consistently enough and the few encounters we did have we got wiped, and I can only wonder if it was ping to blame with two of us being ZA based and the third friend being EU based.

We needed more time to get used to the combat and we just weren't online at the same time enough to get in that practice time.

I'm wondering how successful as a strategy it might be for some missions where the group goes in purely trying to scavenge and avoid conflict, on such missions don't go in too geared up as you wouldn't want to lose too much if dying, but if one gets into PvP skirmishes the team might be doomed to get the short end of the stick due to being out-gunned.

Then in other missions one goes in fully kitted out and looking for a fight, winning PvP encounters should yield a lot of loot from the bested players. Of course this is going to be a lottery in and of itself because there is always going to be a better skilled and equipped enemy team that one might encounter from time to time (if not more often than not!).

In terms of wokeness, one of our friends was messing around with his characters look 😅

View attachment 1857616
All 3 of us in the squad have that combo of face and hair.
 
I saw a thread on X with this pic:
1761200661156.png

Which is pretty much exactly the face my character started off with when I opened character creation screen.
After fooling around to try get a non-trans looking char, our team launched the first match and we saw everyone ended up choosing the Old man as that was the only "manly" looking character.
No beards though :mad:
 

Cheaper than Steam.
Apparently ZA's price for Arc Raiders is one of the highest in the world comparatively.
Yeah I sort of complained on X about the ZA pricing being expensive for us but nothing will come of it, its too close to launch now :( but also even if they adjusted ZA pricing, I wonder how would it be handled for people who already bought the game on the ZA store, would that even be possible to do partial refunds, I'm guessing not.

I'll probably end up funding my purchase with Steam vouchers bought with eBucks and that way it won't sting so much.

edit: I am also toying with the idea of upgrading to an RTX 5070 Ti in order to get the game 'free' but it's more of a want than a need as I have an RTX 3080 currently.
 

Really looking forward to this while BF6 goes back on the stove.
Are you going deluxe or standard version?

Sucks that we are paying such an inflated price, converted to USD just shy of $43 currently for the base version on ZA Steam Store.
 
Are you going deluxe or standard version?

Sucks that we are paying such an inflated price, converted to USD just shy of $43 currently for the base version on ZA Steam Store.

No chance of me going for the deluxe version since I don't care for cosmetics at all.
It's slightly cheaper at G2a as posted earlier, but they said you only receive the key on launch day (the 30th), so no pre-loading.
 
I'm hearing that the preloads are starting today and that it's under 30gb in terms of the download size.
 
The FOMO is real, I caved, preload started...
 

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played a few now struggling to get a match. This is sick though. The thrill of loosing your stash is insane.
 
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