ARC Raiders devs detail plans for voluntary wipe mechanics

Embark Studios has revealed its plans for progression wipes in its upcoming extraction shooter ARC Raiders. Contrary to other popular games of the genre, the title will not feature mandatory wipes for all players in set intervals, but offer a voluntary wipe system, which will allow users to reset their progress in exchange for permanent rewards.

This will be an interesting experiment from the studio, as it will tackle one of the genre’s central challenges in a new way. Since extraction shooters allow players to amass power over time, the power gap between casual and hardcore players opens up quickly, leading to a point at which a hardcore player may not find it necessary anymore to engage with the PvE components of the game and instead solely engage in PvP, hunting down inherently disadvantaged users.

Developers’ traditional solution to this problem are periodic progression wipes, which reset every player’s resources and equipment back to zero. While this temporarily evens the odds again, the move destroys any hard-won progress, which once again hits casual players the hardest, even if – on paper – it’s to their benefit.

In ARC Raiders, there won’t be any such sweeping progression wipes. Instead, players who are feeling like they want to begin afresh can tackle Projects. After completing all objectives of these Projects, they get the ability to reset their account, losing everything aside from permanent meta progression rewards such as cosmetics.

Embark Studios wants to incentivize these voluntary wipes with rewards, such as exclusive cosmetics and permanent account boosts, though the developers emphasize that these will not provide any combat advantages.

In this way, the studio hopes to offer players the best of both worlds. “It’s not a silver bullet, and won’t achieve the clean break that a mandatory global reset does, but it does aim to be more equitable to all players. Wherever possible, we want to value your time spent in the game as much as you do. Of course, this is a complex topic, so we’ll be keeping an eye on the discussion around this message and follow up as necessary,” the developers concluded.

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