Enemies that shake up the gameplay
A lot of praise from the community goes repeatedly to the enemy design of ARC Raiders. Unlike in Escape from Tarkov, you won’t encounter human NPCs (“Scavs”), but machines controlled by artificial intelligence.
They don’t just fall over after a shot like in a realistic setting, but have – as JesseKazam points out – different tasks:
- Some are simply bullet sponges that are meant to force long firefights to lure other players into PvP situations.
- Others are supposed to represent “real dangers” that players can eliminate.
- And a few are true raid bosses that require multiple squads to defeat, but have the best loot.
The enemies create a constant feeling of tension, sometimes leading to harmless objects causing fear.
Many players agree, however, that while the PvE opponents are quite tough, they make the game more interesting and can lead to new situations, such as cooperation between different squads (with optional betrayal afterwards), even sometimes against one’s own teammates.
Different from Escape from Tarkov, but not unique
The same type of enemies was already present in The Cycle: Frontier, a PvPvE shooter from the German studio Yager Development in Berlin. Here, it wasn’t robots, but the planet’s wildlife that served as PvE adversaries with the same roles as the machines in ARC Raiders.
Particularly the boss fights back then distinguished The Cycle: Frontier from other shooters in the genre and now do the same with ARC Raiders. Often such situations were linked to map events that could draw the attention of other players.
However, for The Cycle, this was not enough to secure success. After Early Access since 2019, the game was long only playable via the Epic Launcher. In June 2022, the 1.0 version was released, but was already discontinued in September 2023.
