Arc Raiders has a weird problem for a shooter: the worst guns in the game are really good

After 60 hours of exchanging bullets like business cards, wisdom is sinking in: the best Arc Raiders weapon is the one in your hand. Tune out all the color-coded lizard brain loot and you'll find that virtually anything can send a dude right back to Speranza in a magazine or two, from common stock rifles to coveted epic guns. For my money, there is exactly one truly bad gun in Arc Raiders: the Hairpin pistol. I've gotten more kills – including an entire team wipe that I will never outdo – with the hammer. But everything else is a certified dude killer. Sure, an upgraded Osprey makes sniping on Blue Gate or Spaceport feel almost evil, but if you've got cover to duck behind between shots, a maxed-out Ferro will kill a god.

This realization hit like a basketball to the nose. If these guns all feel basically the same, within maybe 20% of each other in terms of Dude-Killing Power – and we in the business exclusively use DKP for our benchmarks – what the heck am I working toward? Why am I hoarding all this blue and pink gear? What good is it when I can easily get got by a dirt-cheap Stitcher, as evidenced by the folks I stole this gear from? And what is its value beyond the Pavlovian ability to instill gear fear through arbitrary colors that the card games and looters of the world have at this point chiseled on the inside of my skull?

Then I passed through the veil. I shouldn't be hoarding this stuff. My rarest guns are barely better than my cheapest guns. And to go back to the Osprey and Ferro comparison, one of these is significantly easier to acquire, cheaper to upgrade, and less painful to lose. And as I repeatedly finagle my stash back down from the dreaded red overflow text as if I've overdrafted my checking account, that, too, sounds like wisdom.

Bury me with my Ferro IV

What does it mean for dirt-cheap weapons to compete with high-rarity trophies? Well, it does mean the Arc Raiders loot economy is a bit of a sham, with most of the pricey options being the equivalent of $40 T-shirts marked up for their branding, but I'm here to argue that has its upsides.

The most important part of any shooter, even one so driven by economics and sociology, is gunplay. It would be foolish to make the most accessible guns feel like crap just to make the expensive ones better by comparison. Yes, level one common guns have more bloom than an Unreal Engine 5 sunrise and take two business days to reload, but with even a few incredibly affordable upgrades, they really come alive.

Guns generally feel better as you upgrade and mod them in Arc Raiders, not as you climb the gear tiers. I'd take a level four Ferro over a level one Osprey any day of the week. There are some vertical upgrades baked into the tiers, but for the most part they feel horizontal. More often than not, you aren't getting demonstrably stronger. You're just getting more specific ways to play, or obtaining comfier weapons. And if 11 years of Destiny 2 has taught me anything, it's that a comfy gun should not be underestimated, whatever the DPS nerds say.

Common guns are your foundation. The Ferro lets you snipe, the Stitcher and Rattler are your basic bullet hoses, and the Kettle is a quieter semi-auto option. Uncommon guns round out the weapon sandbox, introducing changes of kind – the burst-fire Arpeggio, hard-hitting Anvil, and your first shotgun with the Il Toro. Rare guns specialize. Sniping is fleshed out with the Osprey and Renegade, while the now-nerfed Venator makes pistols feel less like a side dish and more like a main course.

Only with epic guns do we really start to see more one-to-one upgrades – the Bobcat replacing the Stitcher, for example, the Vulcano taking Il Toro's spot, or the Tempest beating out mid-range options like the Arpeggio. We also see yet more specialization in the epic and legendary tier, with the Arc-killing Hullcracker being the most specialized of all, tailor-made for hunting end-game bots. (Making guns strong against bots and good against humans is, perhaps, rich design space, as the likes of the Stitcher and Kettle suck against Arc.)

This, I think, is good design. You can feel these upgrades in your hands, but weapon skill, map knowledge, utility items, and – the ultimate Arc Raiders cheat code – shooting first can overcome virtually any gap in rarity. This balance makes Arc Raiders feel good to play right out of the box – again, please upgrade your common guns, it costs like one paper clip and a can of beans – and ensures that almost anyone can kill almost anyone. If anything, the root problem might be that high-rarity weapons are absurdly expensive to build and upgrade and mod and repair and oh god make it stop, Scrappy can only scavenge so hard.

Loot-based matchmaking is a terrible idea if only because you want the possibility of finding jackpot players in a lobby, and since you want folks of all rarities mingling with each other, you can't put too much space between the floor and ceiling of weapon power. Otherwise, the rich would just get richer. If pink guns guaranteed victory over the common Stitcher-wielding peasant, Arc Raiders would be a bad game, or at least a much worse one. Instead, we all get to play a shooter instead of just participating in an economy.

I understand the frustration of finally uncorking your stash-aged epics only to immediately lose them to a bunch of dudes in Stella Montis packing loadouts worth far less than yours, but consider this: you could be those dudes. And the fact that you could be those dudes, trading up on a madcap run that turns a common starting loadout into an over-encumbered rainbow grab-bag of blues and greens and even pinks, dare we dream, is a loadbearing column of Arc Raiders. Even if it makes the top shelf less enticing, the worst guns have to be good because they are both the introduction to the game and most of the gunplay overall.

Here's how to get blueprints in Arc Raiders to expand your collection of ready-made weapons.