The act of friendliness in socially combative games implies a commitment to trusting strangers—and, eventually, to upholding an empathetic objectivity even when that cordiality is undermined. It’s a paradoxical position: extending kindness in a space designed to reward suspicion. At least, that’s what I found myself confronting during the Arc Raiders Server Slam this past weekend. I’d like to look at how Arc Raiders uses balancing, multi-pathed gameplay loops, and diverse player objectives to create an environment that encourages a rare kind of social play—one that explores interpersonal conflict while acknowledging the choices we each make as distinct beings aware of our place in the Arc-inhabited world.
Virtual worlds have long leveraged their ability to abstract the feeling of risk away from the capital habits visible in contemporary human exchange. In most games, this abstraction becomes a mirror for market behavior: players learn to manage risk through accumulation, manipulating in-game capital and power to maintain control. That control, like wealth, is always shadowed by the threat of regression—of losing what you’ve built, of being forced to start again.
Early mechanics such as save-gating and time limits embodied this tension. They made each moment matter, forcing players to treat progress as a scarce resource. In the MacVenture series of the 1980s, for example, your survival often depended on maintaining a fragile equilibrium—like in Deja Vu, where your cognition itself hinged on accessing a dwindling drug supply. Later, games such as Resident Evil or Dark Souls refined this dynamic by forcing you to save at specific points, turning space itself into a psychological hazard. It’s the same unease as driving through the Midwest, deciding whether to stop for gas now or risk running out before the next station.
These games tap into a kind of existential fear—less about losing capital, more about being erased. They don’t negate your effort; they deny its record. When we look at roguelikes, though, we can see a shift: death becomes data. Progress persists as memory, score, or loot. The fear evolves—from losing existence to losing ownership. In a culture that prizes possession, lloot becomes a form of proof, and progress begins to resemble property. What once symbolized exploration now carries the logic of investment.
I focus on these darker, antisocial qualities because they expose how designers use human relationships with risk to play with the emotional palette of horror. Horror, here, isn’t only about fear—it’s about confronting instability, socially and personally. Over the past decade, survival, battle royale, and extraction games have expanded on this by turning other players into active variables within that instability. The threat is no longer abstract; it’s embodied. These games build living economies of trust and betrayal, where moral choice and mechanical risk overlap.
Survival games tend to be the most open-ended. The goal is endurance, which transforms every alliance into a fragile social contract. Cooperation becomes provisional, useful until it isn’t. Battle royales condense this even further: many enter, one leaves. The structure guarantees loss for most, turning participation itself into an act of acceptance. Winning is secondary to how one carries themselves through the inevitability of failure.
Extraction games complicate that equation. They make victory plural and moral. You can escape without killing, succeed without domination. The player’s choices—when to fight, when to flee, when to share—become ethical gestures. These systems mirror real-world economies, where power often hides behind collaboration and wealth accumulation disguises itself as opportunity. Even generosity can become strategic.
This brings me to Arc Raiders itself. Initially conceived as an immersive open-world PvE looter-shooter—something closer to Destiny—the game recently reoriented into a PvP extraction shooter. That shift intrigued me. It suggests that the game’s foundational systems were built for cooperation rather than competition, which sets it apart from nearly every other title in the genre. The world is lush and expansive, offering raid-style bosses that demand collaboration, puzzles that invite word-of-mouth solutions or ARG-like experimentation, and small gestures of generosity—helping a stranger extract under the threat of overwhelming AI hostility.
The introduction of PvP extends these preexisting social systems rather than replacing them. It adds layers of coercion, solidarity, and ambivalence—creating social tension without erasing the cooperative impulse. Players are forced to navigate the contradictions of shared survival: the temptation to hoard and the instinct to help. Where most risk-driven games reward dominance, Arc Raiders cultivates reflection. It allows for experimentation with moral identity—players respond through live interpersonal decisions that expose the fragility of trust. This brings the self-reflective quality of Baldur’s Gate or Red Dead Redemption into an open multiplayer setting, where player-generated ethics and improvisational empathy actively shape the tone of future experiences. Much like how everyone seems to have a different favorite character or social reading of Baldur’s Gate III, Arc Raiders lets each player define their own ethical posture within the shared world.
The world itself is breathtaking and demanding. Its AI is oppressive and unyielding; approach an encounter unprepared and you’ll be swiftly overwhelmed. Yet the world rewards exploration as richly as combat. Looting and extraction offer tangible progression, but PvP yields only what you can carry—and often at the expense of damaged gear. This de-emphasizes server dominance and destabilizes the wealth loops that typically define extraction shooters. Progress becomes less about accumulation and more about continuity—about what knowledge, routes, and relationships you sustain between raids.
My own experience with Arc Raiders has spanned a wide range of social encounters, from friendly raids that turned into cooperative survival to betrayals after moments of trust. Playing with a friend, we often defaulted to hostility—attacking on sight in pursuit of exponential gain—but proximity chat frequently redirected us toward unexpected truces or improvised aid. As a solo player, I took the opposite approach: never firing first, partly out of appreciation for the game’s cooperative potential. Over time, I found that most players, even when incentivized toward extraction and profit, leaned toward restraint and reciprocity. The social environment rewarded neighborliness more consistently than aggression, suggesting that the game’s design—its dense world, oppressive AI, and shared fragility—makes generosity a practical, not sentimental, choice that also enforces our human capacity for empathy toward those with shared experience.
Committing to friendliness requires accepting the inevitability of mistrust. No one has reason to believe you mean well until you’ve both extracted safely—and even attempts to prove good will can be interpreted as deceit. Ceasefires become fragile performances of faith, often brought on by the arrival of more oppressive AI forces that render human conflict momentarily meaningless. What emerges is a kind of social realism: cooperation not as moral purity but as pragmatic coexistence under duress.
Arc Raiders also excels in its environmental design. Hostile NPCs act as both hazard and tool: lure grenades, recorders, barricades, door stops, and ziplines let players shape the terrain, though always provisionally—each tool carries the potential for failure or backfire. Every raid, successful or not, yields materials for an intricate crafting system, supporting player progression through a multi-pronged economy of money, seeds, and blueprints. Many quests don’t require successful extraction, ensuring that even failure produces growth. The system imagines progress as interdependence—where endurance and cooperation, rather than possession, become the lasting forms of value.
Boukie Games 