The core of ARC Raiders is looting and leveling. The developers therefore removed a feature that would have harmed this principle.
What is this feature? Many games, especially MMOs, have an auction house. Here you can offer various items for sale or trade and also search for items you still need.
Trading is then primarily conducted between players. Thus, even without loot luck, you have the opportunity to upgrade, for example, a workbench if another player offers the needed materials in the auction house.
Now Virgil Watkins, the design lead of ARC Raiders, revealed in an interview with GamesRadar that the extraction shooter almost had an auction house, but the developers removed it because it would have ruined the game.
“You only go out to find the most valuable items“
How would this feature have ruined ARC Raiders? Watkins explains that Embark experimented with an auction house, but it changed the flow of the shooter:
“We had previously examined a trading system like [an auction house] and even partially built it. But in the end, it led to the game being all about coins. You only go out to find the most valuable items, exchange them [for coins] and just buy the things you actually want.”
Currently, in ARC Raiders, you find specific items mainly in designated locations. For example, if you want to upgrade your weapon station, you need rusted gears, among other things. You can find these in industrial loot zones like the Laugerhaus complex on the map “The Blue Gate”. Ideally, you go into a corresponding loot zone and search containers there, instead of just spawning on a map, wandering around aimlessly, and looting only what has the highest selling value.
Watkins notes that this game flow would have changed with an auction house:
“Suddenly, it almost doesn’t matter if you go out, explore the right place, and search the right containers – or have that cool feeling: ‘Oh, finally! This is exactly what I needed, and now I can do the other thing I wanted to do with it.'”
So could there still be trading: If players currently want to “trade” in ARC Raiders, they simply drop items on the ground. While that is okay, Watkins also talks about an alternative: “We definitely want to implement an offer where you hold up the item and someone actually interacts with it in your hand, to take it from you.”
This is what the community says: On Reddit, the removal of the auction house is being discussed by some community members. One user is convinced that it would have completely stopped one of the fundamental elements of the game – finding loot and then successfully extracting it.
Some players also believe that marketplaces and auction houses have already harmed other games like Diablo 3 and Dark and Darker. Many therefore support the developers’ decision.
Watkins recently gave some interesting insights into the development of ARC Raiders and shared his own impressions of the extraction shooter. He is aware, for example, that ARC Raiders knows one thing is missing, and admits: he is instead playing with free loadouts
