Dallon Avery 
In a recent interview, Escape from Tarkov creator Nikita Buyanov called ARC Raiders “an extraction shooter for casual people.” Gaming media picked up the quote immediately, but is that really the full story, and what do ARC Raiders players actually think about it? There’s more to this story.
The Extraction Shooter King
An extraction shooter is a sub-genre of games where the main goal is to reach an extraction point on the map to exit a run, keeping all the stuff you found. This is the kind of game where you lose absolutely everything when you die - the things you found and the things you brought with you. Obviously, we have another genre of games where you lose everything on death - battle royales, but these games push players closer to each other as time passes, forcing them to fight each other. In extraction shooters, killing players is mostly optional, which opens up the way for lots of different playstyles.
There’s been a surge of extraction shooter games, but when this genre pops up in a conversation, most gamers bring up Escape From Tarkov, the game that pioneered this genre and is the sole reason all the other extraction shooters exist.
More than Just Extraction
EFT is more than just extraction, though; it’s an unforgiving survival game where players must track their PMC mercenary’s vitals, consume food and drinks, know which medicine to take to cure various injuries, and wait in real time until the PMC’s full recovery. Combined with the haunting atmosphere of a modern Russian town torn apart by warring factions, the empty streets, freshly abandoned apartments, and shopping malls that seem to have been bustling just yesterday make the game feel fully deserving of the “Psychological Horror” tag on its Steam page.
Obviously, this attention to detail and relentless pursuit of realism draws a certain kind of gamer, but it also makes EFT far less friendly to a wider audience, to say the least. Not everyone is willing to learn which bullet calibers their rifle can use without blowing up in their face. It was only a matter of time before someone made an extraction shooter that catered to more than just mil-sim fans.
Do Extraction Shooters Have to Be Hardcore to Be Good?
There have been many attempts to recreate the same rollercoaster of emotions and thrills you get in EFT, but with less penalizing deaths. I can’t help but mention The Cycle, which was the first of the most promising extraction shooters that tried to bring this genre to the wider masses. Unfortunately, that game is now dead. There’s also Hunt: Showdown, which is an extraction shooter, but it's also its own beast, because it still has something from battle royales, where eventually players are drawn to the same Point of Interest and fight over the same target.
But then came ARC Raiders, and took the gaming community by storm. There are so many things about this game that work in its favor - the setting, a friendlier third-person view, and the AI-controlled ARC robots in their amazing and weird variety. There’s almost zero waiting between one run and another. Win or lose, you can get back in there in a matter of seconds with the free kits that give you the basic loadout!
I believe part of what made ARC Raiders so good is the fact that it wasn’t trying to be an extraction shooter in the first place. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the fact that the game was first announced as a PvE co-op looter shooter before turning into a PvPvE extraction shooter is a big reason gamers can’t get enough of it.
Is ARC Raiders a “Casual Shooter”?
Going back to the recent interview, it was actually focused on a new game Nikita Buyanov is now making with a new studio. The new game is called Fragmentation Order, and it is set in a somewhat grounded sci-fi setting. It will have similar extraction shooter mechanics, but Nikita says it will be much more than that. So, in the interview that took place shortly after the release of the story trailer for the new game, with Dean Takahashi for GamesBeat, there was a question about whether or not the popularity of ARC Raiders has inspired Nikita to do something differently, to which he replied: “It’s an extraction shooter for casual people. It’s not an option for us. We want to have the most painful, most challenging, and most rewarding experience.”
So, is ARC Raiders a game for casuals or not? Yes, it definitely is. But hear me out - it’s not a bad thing. This is actually why ARC Raiders made history alongside Escape from Tarkov as one of the most popular extraction shooters. Yes, the stakes are just as high, and yes, you do lose all of your stuff, besides what you put in the safe pockets, when you die. But ARC is casual more in the social sense of the word than in its actual gameplay. It’s true that in Tarkov, players are less keen to take chances, preferring a "shoot first, talk later” kind of approach in raids. Whereas in ARC Raiders, players are more prone to negotiate and make allies with each other. The aggression-based matchmaking reinforces this even more with timed events where the only goal in a raid is to defeat huge ARC robots, which can only be done in a group. The PvP is never disabled, but it is less appealing when no one is trying to loot anything.
ARC Players Are Divided
Because ARC Raiders is seen as the friendlier extraction shooter, this creates a false sense of security, and there are a lot of ARC players who are taking sides in the ongoing debate about whether the game should have a dedicated PvE mode. While that goes against what the game currently is, the two sides of the community hate each other very much. So, while in EFT, you kind of expect that every player on the map is your enemy, getting shot in the back from another ARC player who was acting “friendly” a minute ago does feel justifiably unfair.
Even though Nikita’s answer might seem like he’s been taking a shot at ARC Raiders, I offer a different angle. Both games have different sets of rules - one is more casual, and the other is more hardcore, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t change the behavior and the playstyles you can use in both. You can be as friendly or as hostile as you want in both games, because ultimately, both games are extraction shooters.
