While I'm still not entirely sold on the extraction shooter genre for my gaming tastes specifically, I think that everything I've experienced with ARC Raiders has sold me on its potential and helps me fully understand the hype.
Last week, I participated in an invite-only playtest for the highly anticipated new title featuring content creators and other members of the media after being shown a special presentation by the game's devs at Embark Studios. We got a sampling of a lot that the full game has to offer, including a new map for the first time.
After playing through existing maps Dam Battlegrounds, Spaceport, and Buried City, Embark Studios gave all of us in the playtest some endgame gear to take into the newest map yet, The Blue Gate. The top-tier gear felt like a necessity to compete in this region, where the stunning vistas are laden with endgame loot and endgame enemies.
The Blue Gate is simply gorgeous. The new location is a wide open, lush green countryside, filled with massive open areas and sprinkled with smaller buildings and POIs in between for loot and engagements with other players or AI enemies. Coupled with how highly optimized ARC Raiders feels in general on basically any standard 2025 gaming PC, the lighting and detail in the environment felt like a feat to witness.
When I first spawned into the area with my special ARC-specific launcher called the Hullcracker (needed to deal any damage to most of the heavily-armored robot enemies in the area), I found a lemon tree with lemons strewn about the area. You can kick the tree, spawning more lemons, and those can be consumed to give a small amount of stamina, which is important, especially when wearing a Heavy Shield that slows down your movement and drains your stamina quickly.
With time in the playtest running out and our inventories packed, myself and two other members of games media sought out conflict with our top-tier gear and found it pretty quickly in the form of two full teams of content creators working together using in-game VOIP. In a six-versus-three battle, we pretty quickly got destroyed, but the dangerous ARCs in the area sussed out the noise and created some problems for them as we were sent back to the lobby. You'll likely find myself and team getting taken out if you peruse new YouTube videos hitting the web at the same time this article goes live.
What I found most important from the few hours of playtime and demo from Embark is that ARC Raiders feels like it's going to be an evolving game, and one that likely won't be reviewable at launch because of it. In the presentation, Embark teased that it wants players "to participate in the expansion of the world itself," and to "continuously update and keep the experience fresh," and this feels like a core part of the game and its future. The Blue Gate is the start of it all.
What may be the first step of that world expansion is called Stella Montis, a location in the mountains north of The Blue Gate, which the devs said can be discovered via exploration of the underground network of tunnels around Speranza. To me, it sounds like the studio is teasing a new locale that will be unlocked for all players once it's discovered through The Blue Gate, akin to a new story beat unlocking when players complete a raid in a game like Destiny 2. If The Blue Gate is endgame, then Stella Montis may be considered post-game or something different entirely.
I wish I could've found out more, but questions were not allowed during this presentation as it was centered around gameplay, which is something that most players are already sold on. But the mountain that towers over the map teases whatever lies in the future, and that's enough to excite gamers for now.
The Blue Gate feels like ARC Raiders' first of many "endgame" style areas, where you want to be fully geared up before entering, lest you get shredded by the ARCs and Raiders in the area that are looking to farm you for gear (or, in my case, YouTube content). And in an extraction shooter, it's all about that risk and reward when it comes to deploying into The Blue Gate and maps like it.
ARC Raiders launches on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S tomorrow, but that sounds like only just the beginning for what feels like a game that could have some serious legs.
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The post I played ARC Raiders’ new endgame map The Blue Gate, and it’s as gorgeous as it is deadly appeared first on Destructoid.
