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In player discussions of free loadouts in Arc Raiders, which are treated as an essential mechanic by some people and the devil incarnate by others, two solutions to this perceived scourge are often proposed. Developer Embark could guarantee that players using free loadouts spawn late into active raids, or the devs could offer exclusive raids with a minimum gear value to weed out the dreaded frees. I discussed the feedback on late spawns in Arc Raiders with design lead Virgil Watkins, and I also wanted to get his take on the idea of premium or high-value raids that function like a high ante table at a casino.
Has Embark ever discussed special raids like one with, essentially, a 'You must be this geared to enter' sign? "Oh, for sure," Watkins tells me. "We've discussed a lot of different criteria for queuing up. And of course, there's other examples out there, like the labs in [Escape from Tarkov] needing a special item to get in and stuff.
"I think for the moment, we don't want to segment the player base too much. We don't want to put people in situations like, 'Hey, we're trying to play together, but I don't have the criteria to go play with you and now we can't play together.' There's some hesitation to put barriers between players and the content they want to play, or want to make an attempt at. It's not something that's off the table for us, but I think we have to be a little careful in how we do that."
The idea with this specific type of premium raid sounds pretty simple. A variant of one or more of the maps in Arc Raiders, perhaps as part of the hourly map modifier and event rotation, could have a minimum loadout value of, say, 40,000 coins. If your starting loadout isn't worth at least that much, you can't jump into that version of the map. This isn't unbelievably expensive, but it's a far cry above the budget builds allotted on free loadouts (around 4,000 to 5,000 coins by Watkins' estimate), and it would theoretically guarantee that everybody you see in a raid has something worthwhile on them.
The imagined effects here seem twofold: you're weeding out free loadout users who often play more aggressively because they have nothing to lose, but you're arguably stoking aggression by making every player an appealing kill. And this does come with the co-op hurdles Watkins mentions, since it functions as a sort of opt-in gear-based matchmaking. I've played Arc Raiders a lot more than one of my friends, for instance, so if we wanted to run a high-value raid together, I'd probably have to give them some stuff first. (I think there's also the risk of people gaming the value system with items that are worth a chunk of coins but have no practical usage, but I digress.)
"I completely get the sentiment," Watkins says. "You want to feel like, 'Yeah, I'm coming in loaded, and I know everybody else in there's gonna be loaded.' And let's have that moment for us, rather than this dude with a Stitcher dropping from the ceiling randomly on us."
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