Arc Raiders wants to tell a story you’ll actually care about in 10 years: ‘We will introduce new locations and start new story arcs’

I don’t usually jump into multiplayer shooters to get wrapped up in storylines or lore implications, but Arc Raiders has had that effect on me in the small bursts I’ve played. The extraction shooter makes a strong impression as you step into its post-future, ’70s-tinged sci-fi Italy.

Arc Raiders has a unique conceit for a PvPvE game that’s fundamentally about filling a backpack with valuable stuff: You’re a citizen of Spiranza, an underground city founded after humanity was forced underground by the Arc, a brigade of homicidal robots that dropped out of the sky one day. At the time of the game, the Arc have dominated the planet’s surface for generations. As a raider, you’re one of the few souls bold enough to brave the surface to loot for valuables.

Sure, my main concern is finding batteries so I can craft a table that lets me craft scopes so that I can snipe other players, but as I’m foraging for scrap metal just outside the vision cone of a flame-throwing bowling ball, I have wondered who built these freaky little robots. That’s one of several big questions that executive producer Aleksander Grøndal hopes players will be asking as they explore the surface in Arc Raiders.

“What has happened to this world? It’s a big question, because the raiders, they don’t know anymore. That’s kind of lost to myth, so they’re trying to piece it together,” Grøndal told PC Gamer in a recent interview.

“And since there’s such a dominant presence on the surface and pushes the population below ground, there’s an ongoing conflict there, but also below ground, there’s pressure from people living [in Spiranza]. It’s not always easy to live as a human society below ground. So there’s people with different agendas and conflicts going on in there as well.”

Grøndal says players will learn by filling out their codex and by completing quests.

“There’s quests that will tell you the immediate story about what’s happening and that can reveal things about… [story] arcs that I just mentioned, or other adjacent stories that take place.

Before you get your hopes up, “quests” in extraction shooters tend to be more like shopping lists than character vignettes. An early series of quests in Arc Raiders reminded me of the starting area of an MMO, tasking me with finding a handful of wires, killing my first Arc, and opening a locked chest.

I question whether Arc Raiders will assemble a gripping narrative from brief voiceovers delivered between objectives, or if the most interesting tidbits about the world will have to be scavenged from the margins. That’s the vibe I’m getting from Arc Raider’s codex, which Grøndal says is more than just a guide to defeating each robot.

“The codex is a repository of all kinds of lore-adjacent notes that are collected, and you can easily go back and read up on what is happening to the Rocketeer [for instance]. And this updates and evolves over time based on quest progression, but also other trigger points you’re visiting, or, like, if you’ve defeated the Wasp five times, and you get to know a bit more about it.”

I asked Grøndal if Embark has taken inspiration from the meta narrative of Helldivers 2, another game about Earth fighting a neverending war with aliens. Nothing he said indicated Arc Raiders will have anything as elaborate or participatory as Arrowhead’s galactic war simulation, but Arc Raiders will have new storylines and events.

“There will be events that the players will participate in. Some of them will be community-based, as in the whole community at large will participate in and they might go from world changing events to more novel Christmas holidays type events,” he said. “We will introduce new locations and new and conclude arcs and start new story arcs. So we see this as an evolving game.”

Grøndal reiterated that Embark wants Arc Raiders to last for at least 10 years, so if that bears out, it’ll definitely have the time to flesh out Spiranza.