Hi there!
In this blog, I want to discuss some thoughts I’ve had whilst playing ARC Raiders. Specifically, how the game manages to create a natural sense of diplomacy and community spirit. I’m interested in how the designers get players to negotiate instead of pulling the trigger every time. I’ll go over some elements of the game and try to pick apart the ways they achieve this.
Create a Lower-Stakes Environment
First of all, I believe ARC Raiders is designed as a more accessible extraction shooter. It reduces the stress caused by the fear of losing loot, trading an element of that away in lieu of a more social and emergent experience. This decision may have been aimed at bridging the gap between hardcore Tarkov players and those who want a slightly less punishing experience.
I think this is achieved in a few ways at the systems level. One key aspect is the lack of an online in-game market, unlike games such as Tarkov or Arena: Breakout which embrace them. Not all items have inherent value; selling loot grants only a small amount of currency usable by the player to upgrade cache size or purchase a limited selection of low to mid-tier equipment. This ties loot directly to your personal meta-progression rather than a universal economy. In competitor games with online markets, items can often be sold for universal currency, creating pressure to target other players for profit. In ARC Raiders, some loot eventually becomes useless, which changes player incentives.
Having some loot be useless actually supports the social aspect of the game. The core loop is collecting specific items from expeditions to upgrade workbenches or your chicken companion, Scrappy. Workbenches let you craft more useful items, while Scrappy provides a steady supply of crafting materials each game, with higher levels granting more. Many upgrade trees require key items only found in the wild, and once used, these items are often no longer needed. This encourages experienced players to assist or gift items to others, helping to foster the altruistic social environment the game encourages. By tying loot to personal progression rather than universal value, the game keeps rewards meaningful without creating a PvP-focused economy.
I believe these design choices intentionally make loot less “valuable” compared to more hardcore extraction shooters. The goal is to create a lower-stakes environment that naturally reduces tension during encounters, making diplomacy a more viable player choice.
Quests are also a key part of the experience, similar to competitor games. They give players objectives each game that reward loot without directly encouraging PvP or aggressive behavior. This pattern seems central to Embark’s approach.
Free Kits are another interesting design choice. They let players enter a match with randomized low-level loot and limited storage for free, even including later maps. While this can feel frustrating, especially when you encounter other players with poor gear, it also reduces the incentive to kill indiscriminately. The effort and resources required to initiate and remain in the average encounter often isn’t worth it either, so this lower-stakes environment tends to instead encourage experimentation, diplomacy, or trickery. Free Kits contrast with other games that have similar options like Quick Kits in Arena: Breakout, which are limited, and with further uses locked behind a premium. These decisions are instead made to increase tension, therefore forcing players to treat every engagement as high-stakes.
ARC Raider’s approach reminds me of Team Fortress 2, where the lack of intense stakes encourages playful, social behaviour. Players can be silly, organize conga lines, or taunt each other playfully – often without consequence. Embark seem to mirror this by providing silly tools, items, and mechanics that make cooperative or friendly interactions feel natural.
Encourage Player Encounters
The next important element is how the moment-to-moment gameplay naturally encourages players to meet one another. This is achieved in a few ways.
First, ARC enemies are extremely powerful, especially in outdoor spaces, and can eliminate players quickly if given a clear line of sight. This forces players indoors, toward scattered interior landmarks, where they can gain an advantage. Combined with the noise generated by fighting ARC (gunfire, breaching crates, running, or triggering alarms), players inevitably draw attention from others. Fighting ARC is a core part of the loop, and the game uses this threat to create natural interactions between players.
Loot placement also encourages encounters. The best items are typically found indoors or in exposed landmarks, often tied to quests. Being indoors gives players safer opportunities to communicate via proximity voice chat or the emote wheel without exposing themselves.
After all, it’s hard to negotiate with someone sniping you from across the map!… leading me onto my next point.
Give Players Reasons to Not Shoot
Someone who is being sniped has very few options, and they aren’t at a range to naturally have a conversation with their attacker. This is a problem for diplomacy, and one of the reasons why I believe Embark made the decision to limit engagement distances. Shorter engagement means close enough to negotiate! Cover is abundant inside and outside the game’s maps, where cover is plentiful, and there is always ample time to react to dive away and recharge your shields and health. This, paired with the fact that the game has no true definitive “good” sniper rifle (the Osprey probably being the closest), makes most engagements happen within mid/close-range.
The third-person perspective further reduces risk when peeking, allowing players to scout safely and putting everyone on more equal terms. The time-to-kill is relatively long, meaning committing to a fight requires effort, giving the defender a real chance to escape or retaliate.
Another subtle but important choice is loot visibility. In games like Tarkov or Arena Breakout, armor, headgear, and equipment are immediately visible, giving other players a reason to attack for profit. In ARC Raiders, the only visible loot is weapons, and you can only see them at close range (or listen to the sound of them if you’re really good). Disconnecting loot appearance from the player model reduces the incentive for immediate aggression as players have no way of assessing loot value at a glance, evening the playing field and creating ample grounds for a diplomatic chat.
Interestingly, this design can also make players feel guilty for attacking someone, as there’s little indication they had anything valuable. This further encourages thoughtful decisions rather than impulsive killing.
Encourage Communication
Communication is encouraged a lot in ARC Raiders. Even if you don’t have a microphone, all the common phrases you might want to say to another player to get through a match are made available from the start. “Don’t shoot!”, “Team up?”, “Yes!”, and “No!”, as well as others. These restricted universal options not only let players know that this form of play is encouraged, but seeds the idea that these methods of play are possible at all. When you begin your first match, you are urged via tooltips to begin experimenting with these phrases. The game suggests diplomacy as an option directly to the player.
Proximity voice chat is a great additional option that lets anyone speak naturally to one another, negotiate over great distances, talk normally, or just act silly. There’s a comedic element to chatting this way, and it adds to the game’s overall sense of community. It adds immersion and emergent opportunities for gameplay, such as sneaking up on a set of players loudly negotiating in the distance.
Encourage Cooperation
Players need to team up in ARC Raiders. We know the ARC is extremely powerful, and so naturally, this sense of community spirit to rise up against the common enemy spurs on a greater relationship between raiders. Without the ARC, the game would struggle to find an incentive that might cause players to aim their weapons elsewhere. They’re essential to the formula.
This sense of player equality is reinforced through item design. Most consumables can be used on anyone, not just squadmates. Players can choose to heal, assist, or betray others, creating a social sandbox where PvP feels neutral and non-hostile by default, but with elements of distrust that causes a unique tension. The mechanics empower players to express themselves with complete freedom, whether as friendly collaborators, opportunistic betrayers, or murder hobos. Each to their own.
Because of this, the social dynamics of the game often transcend the mechanics themselves. Players make moral and strategic choices on their own that shape how encounters play out, and so the truly altruistic actions that break through, for example, feel personal and meaningful. Diplomacy becomes a real, emergent aspect of gameplay, supported by the systems and incentives the designers built.
In Closing
Overall, I believe that ARC Raiders achieves something special with its design choices, encouraging cooperation and emergent diplomacy amongst a truly wild west-style sandbox environment. That is no easy task, for certain.
Now all there is to do is watch the meta inevitably change over time as the player base begins to settle. Will people just resort to constant conflict, or will diplomacy continue to hold up far into the future? Who knows. All we can do is wait and see what happens.
