There’s an expression in the game industry that I’ve seen crop up in more than one game pitch over the years – “we want to do to (game X) what World of Warcraft did to EverQuest.”
The phrase could mean a lot of things, but it’s mostly shorthand for the concept of iterating on an unpolished but beloved game (like EverQuest) and building on the core ideas to craft a friendlier mass-market experience (like World of Warcraft). With WoW, Blizzard followed the same game plan that had once led them to take the lessons of Westwood’s famous proto-RTS Dune 2 and develop Warcraft and Starcraft.
Recently, I’ve heard the phrase used in reference to my favorite game of 2025, Embark’s ARC Raiders. ARC, so the thinking goes, did to Escape from Tarkov what World of Warcraft did to EverQuest.
It’s an apt analogy in ARC’s case. Escape from Tarkov, while it helped define the extraction shooter genre, is a hostile, unpolished, and downright unfriendly game. ARC, by contrast, quickly acquired a larger audience and popularized a genre that was previously a secret club for a murderous segment of dedicated shooter fans.
Recently, I was singing the game’s praises to an industry friend of mine, a fan of hardcore shooters. He hadn’t played much yet, but he wasn’t very impressed. “It’s just Tarkov,” he said. (Though we were chatting in text, I could imagine his dismissive hand-wave.)
But that’s a tough conclusion to swallow if you look at the game through any kind of objective lens. ARC Raiders does so much so well that I haven’t been able to stop talking about it (or playing it) since it launched.
On the Player, Too! podcast, my co-host Rade (also a big ARC fan) and I have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the game, breaking down what works and what doesn’t. But ARC’s brilliance is worthy of additional ink spilled.
So, put on your analytical game evaluator hat and let’s get into it. What did Embark do so right – what are the design choices that turned ARC Raiders into a huge hit that retains its player base at incredibly high levels?
Why is ARC so more than “just Tarkov”?
ARC’s Backbone: Solid Technology
Escape from Tarkov’s November 2025 1.0 launch, which came after a nearly eight-year public beta, was plagued with problems, notably server issues and long queue times. But even at its best, Tarkov players face long queues before getting into a match, sometimes as much as ten minutes depending on map selection. This is a rough ask of players in a genre where you might die in the first thirty seconds of a match.
Hunt Showdown, another leading PvPvE extraction shooter, is better, but still not perfect. Matching can fail, and the startup is slow, usually at least a minute.
By contrast, except for a few rare cases of server downtimes (which happen in any live service game), ARC offers players a smooth and rapid entry. It’s rare I’ve had to wait more than a minute for a match to start up; ten or fifteen seconds is common.
It’s easy to gloss over how important it is for a multiplayer game to get players quickly into matches. Waiting around for a game to start creates the enemy of good design: friction. Attention wanders; the users want to play, not twiddle their thumbs.
Given the realities of the series of tubes that make up the internet, instant launching of multiplayer matches isn’t achievable. Still, the closer a game can get to that, the more engaged the audience will be.
All of ARC’s core tech is solid and doesn’t get in the way of player fun. Network connectivity is good, though the game continues to be plagued by a few desync issues, which sometimes allow shots to clip through corners. The tradeoffs between quality and framerate are excellent; Embark leveraged Unreal 5 in the best ways, turning off unnecessary features that would hurt performance and, through brilliant art direction, squeezing a compelling visual look out of the engine.
Escape from Tarkov, by contrast, is far less optimized. Though its 1.0 launch improved over the early days of the alpha, it’s still not nearly as smooth on mid-range hardware as ARC is.
ARC’s Setting: Intriguing, Unique, and Polished
A certain breed of shooter fan will favor the more grounded “military porn” setting of Tarkov or the more realistic environments of games like ARMA 3 over a science fiction version of post-apocalyptic Italy with imaginary guns. Nothing I say is going to sell ARC to that crowd. But for most players, the setting of ARC Raiders feels like a breath of fresh air.
In a gaming landscape filled with realistic shooters and zombies, ARC presents a near-future world where the surviving humans have been driven underground by a horde of homicidal robots. While that setup on its own is nothing particularly new (cough, cough – Terminator!) Embark’s unparalleled execution of the concept is design magic. The ruined landscapes of the game’s five maps are not only great gameplay spaces; they’re environmental storytelling that rivals the best RPGs.
Every location and point of interest has its own tale to tell. Here is a military checkpoint with rows of rusting, shattered cars; over the hill is a home-building project, abandoned halfway done; deep underground in the metro station are the scattered suitcases and luggage of people who once desperately tried to flee from certain death. I’m reminded of my previous praise for STALKER 2, whose development team paid equal attention to detail in their environmental design.
This isn’t my fault, really. I found them like this!
The visuals for player customization options also contribute to the game’s narrative. Over there is an astronaut who survived a crash; there’s a weird cultist who’s survived by scrounging in the swamp; there’s a mechanic who’s pieced a few bits and bobs together into makeshift armor. The options aren’t the bland and samey military look found in Tarkov or military shooters, but they also express a coherent aesthetic – something that Fortnite’s hordes of wacky licensed skins lacks.
Among leading extraction shooters, only the dark bayou setting of Hunt: Showdown rivals the creativity of the world-building in ARC Raiders. Yet while Hunt: Showdown is relentlessly horror-themed, the world of ARC has spots of light and beauty: stunning landscapes where nature is slowly reclaiming the buildings of a fallen civilization, and the vibrant, polyglot underground city of Speranza where the last survivors of humanity hold out.
ARC’s Game Design: Flexible, Inviting, Diverse
There’s a lot to love about the core mechanics in ARC Raiders. Player traversal through the sprawling, well-designed maps feels great. The shooting mechanics are solid, and the fictional roster of guns all feel and sound fantastic. The AI enemies are scary, often catching even expert players off guard.
But it’s the diverse nature of the game experience that’s kept me steadily playing since the game launched. When I hop into an ARC Raiders match, I never quite know what I’m going to get. I usually have a goal – some place I’m headed, some drop I’m hunting for, some quest I’m trying to complete – but the emergent experience that unfolds tends to mess up my plans.
Whether it’s a friendly encounter with someone playing a recorder or a guitar, a horde of Wasps and Hornets trapping me in a building, or a tense PvP standoff at an extraction site, every match is a new adventure. Everything from the evolving AI enemies to the actions of other players pushes the game experience away from rote predictability.
To date, the team at Embark has stuck to their guns and kept the game PvPvE, despite cries from vocal members of the community arguing for a PvE mode. It’s the right call. I can go entire matches without seeing another player, or I can end up engaged in running PvP fights for nearly a whole match; if I hang around the fringes, it’s easy to avoid PvP encounters.
The tension the behavior of other human players creates in the game isn’t unique – it’s a core element that makes extraction shooters addictive. But ARC has avoided the usual extraction shooter decline where the player base wilts away until only the hardcore PvP crowd is left. I still encounter both genuinely friendly players and backstabbing extract-camping lunatics. It feels more like the mix of players that play an MMO than the usual competitive crowd.
There’s a lot of great thought behind Embark’s flavorful stew. Strong design choices are what retain its unique player base – large maps with lots of interesting hidey-holes and looting routes, AI enemies that require cooperation to take out, and genuine benefits from both working together and being a camping jerk. The early crowd clamoring for a PvE mode has quieted in recent days, as the community evolves and defines its own special style.
Come On In; The Water’s Fine!
Unlike previous extraction shooter heavyweights Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown, ARC Raiders is a great experience even for new players. Lots of my friends would never play another extraction shooter, but were willing to give ARC a shot. Even if they didn’t all come away as superfans, they all admit there’s a lot to like.
Is it perfect? No, but what game is? There are balance issues; there are unforgivably low drop rates for certain materials (curse you, rusted gears!) There are spots where you get stuck in the terrain. There are the usual cheaters that plague every multiplayer title. There are ugly encounters with toxic teenagers hurling slurs (less the fault of the developer, more the fault of society).
But in a few short months, ARC Raiders has not only climbed into the top-five of my “most hours played on Steam” list – it’s secured a spot among my all-time favorite games.
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