Last week I was: making friends with every raider over a mutual hunt for lemons in Arc Raiders.
This week I've been: continuing to team up with players in Arc Raiders, and blasting the mean ones.
Arc Raiders has a bunch of random crap for you to collect, from toasters and alarm clocks to cat beds, olives, scrap metal, and so on. Of course, there are also guns and other, more combat-focused items to loot, too. It's a lot to juggle, admittedly, but Arc Raiders has two features more extraction games need: detailed item cards and an optional auto-unloading backpack.
Each item, no matter how flashy or mundane, will have a description that tells you not only what it is and what it's used for, but also roughly where to find it. There are a few outliers with inaccurate or misleading descriptions, but for the most part, you know exactly what each item can do for you. Hell, some even clue you in on cool interactions, like throwing fireball burners as if they were grenades, or using fabric as a makeshift bandage, so it pays to read, folks.
It helps that there aren't actually any completely useless items in Arc Raiders to begin with, as everything is either equippable, recyclable, sellable, or used to craft or upgrade something else.
This even applies to items you need for quests or specific upgrades, where you can preview the required items and get an understanding of where to start your search.
It's never exact enough to spoil the fun of tracking down everything you need for any given upgrade, but you're not left in the dark or sent packing to Google. And that's greatly appreciated in a game where my loot is always on the line and I'm dealing with scary robots and players breathing down my neck.
It also has the knock-on effect of making it so you're not hauling around a bunch of items that you don't actually need. Got what you need for Scrappy or a specific quest? Then you can more or less ignore those items going forward.
Nevertheless, you'll inevitably come back from a run with a backpack filled to the brim with loot—unless you died and donated it to your killer, of course. That's where the auto-unload backpack button swoops in, my saviour. This quickly moves all the resources out of your inventory into your stash, but smartly skips over stuff like your weapons, ammo, and consumables in your quick slots.
In other words, you can dump everything you don't need for your next run and quickly return topside without having to mind-numbingly deconstruct your bag every time. After all, I'm here to kill robots and make friends over our mutual search for lemons, not do inventory admin like it's a punishment for actually extracting in one piece.
