I Came to Fight the Machines. ARC Raiders Asked Me to Become One.

An open letter to Embark Studios

Dear Embark,

I am not writing this because I hate ARC Raiders. I am writing it because, for a while, I loved it far more than I expected to love any video game.

When I saw the original reveal trailer, I saw humanity returning to the surface of a ruined world to face an overwhelming mechanical enemy. I saw ordinary people surviving together against something enormous, alien and merciless. The premise seemed clear.

The ARC were the enemy. We were the Raiders.

I understand that games change during development. Visions evolve, strategies shift, and a trailer is not a contract. But expectations do not disappear simply because a product changes direction. Sometimes the original promise remains more powerful than the final design. For me, that promise was cooperation against the machines.

Apparently, I misunderstood the second half.

When the game arrived, my brother, my friend and I entered matches as a trio. We carried weapons and ammunition, but also musical instruments: a flute, a guitar, a shaker. Everyone had something. We brought spare defibrillators to revive strangers. We wanted to create the kind of encounters that become memorable precisely because nobody was forced to be kind, yet someone chose to be.

We waited excitedly for the piano to become playable. It was ridiculous. It was beautiful.

I bought the game on PlayStation and subscribed to PlayStation Plus largely to share that experience with people close to me. Later, I subscribed to GeForce NOW, bought the game again on Steam and purchased skins. I created a Twitch channel and rearranged hardware, audio routing and streaming software because I thought this could become the game I played publicly. At one point, I even visited the Embark careers page. There was no suitable position—my work is in web engineering, not game development—but still, I looked.

That is what enthusiasm looks like before it becomes disappointment. It spends money. It spends time. It makes plans.

And then, slowly, the game begins teaching it a lesson: do not trust anyone. Do not help anyone. Do not celebrate or look inside your inventory while another Raider is nearby. Do not bring valuable equipment unless you are prepared to lose it to someone who waited for you to complete the difficult part.

Shoot first. Ask questions only if the body begins speaking.

The Matriarch represents everything I love about ARC Raiders and everything that eventually made me want to leave. Players arrive carrying expensive gear. They spend ammunition, healing items and time. People are downed and revived; some attack the machine, some distract it, and some rescue the fallen.

For a few minutes, the premise makes sense again. Humanity faces the ARC, so humanity fights the ARC together.

Then the machine collapses. Everyone approaches the remains to collect their share, and sometimes a player who contributed nothing shoots the others in the back while they are looking through their inventories. The predator receives the loot. The cooperative players receive a lesson.

I understand the theory. Trust has meaning because betrayal is possible. Extraction feels rewarding because failure has consequences. Uncertainty creates tension, and hostile players create stories that scripted encounters cannot. This is coherent game design.

It is also a remarkably effective machine for converting kindness into stupidity.

A peaceful player is not merely choosing another playstyle. They are volunteering to become content for someone else. The aggressor receives a target who may hesitate before returning fire. The camper receives equipment without defeating the challenge that produced it. The opportunist receives the result of someone else’s preparation, ammunition and risk. The pacifist receives the privilege of learning the same lesson again.

And the punishment reaches backward in time. I do not merely lose what I collected during the match; I lose the equipment I brought with me, which may represent several previous matches and hours of accumulated resources. The game does not only take the current evening. It takes part of the previous one too.

This is not merely losing a gun. It is watching past leisure turn into present regret because someone waited until I looked away.

A good game needs tension. A world without danger becomes empty, a victory without risk becomes administrative work, and a large ARC enemy should be frightening. I am not asking for a game without difficulty. But tension and misery are not the same thing.

Tension says: I may fail if I make the wrong decision. Misery says: I may lose because someone I never saw decided that my evening should belong to them.

Being shot from a tower at Spaceport by someone I had no realistic chance to locate does not create an interesting decision. There is no moral dilemma, negotiation or meaningful encounter from my perspective. One player was playing a hunting game. The other was inventory.

I used to enter Topside with excitement. Now I often enter with fear—not the enjoyable fear of hearing heavy mechanical movement beyond a wall or running low on ammunition as an ARC patrol approaches, but the exhausting fear of another human being. I scan rooftops instead of appreciating the world. I distrust footsteps while completing objectives, hesitate before helping downed players, and hear someone say “friendly” only to wonder whether it is an intention or a tactic.

I do not feel clever when I think this way. I feel diminished.

Whenever I resist that transformation, the game corrects me. It takes the loot, the equipment and the time, then sends me back to Speranza to repeat the experiment until I understand: become harder and more suspicious. Stop carrying spare defibrillators. Stop playing music. See every Raider as a container of potentially useful objects.

Become efficient. Become rational. Become a machine.

I am a senior software engineer. I have spent enough years building products to understand that this is intentional. The PvPvE structure is not a checkbox someone forgot to make optional; it is the strategy. It shapes the economy, progression, matchmaking, maps, rewards and identity of the game. I understand why you will not casually dismantle your central design decision.

I also understand that separating players between PvE, PvP and PvPvE would divide the population. Queue times could grow, match quality could become inconsistent, and some regions or platforms might not have enough active players to support every preference at every hour. These are real product constraints. But I am not convinced the answer must be to make the decision for me.

There are evenings when I want uncertainty, when I want to hunt, when I accept that another Raider may become the final boss of the match. And there are evenings when I simply want to study the machines, complete a puzzle and fight beside my brother without spending the entire expedition waiting for a bullet in the back. I am an adult. I am capable of deciding which experience I want today.

The game already warns me that disabling crossplay may result in longer matchmaking times. That is fair: it presents a trade-off and lets me decide whether I accept it. I can read the warning, understand the consequence and wait. What is harder to accept is being told, implicitly, that preserving a particular design philosophy matters more than allowing me to choose the kind of evening I am willing to have.

I do not need every choice to be optimal. I only need the choice to be mine.

Perhaps ARC Raiders simply wants too much. It wants to be a cooperative game about humanity facing a mechanized threat and a competitive game about humans preying on each other. It wants players to communicate but never feel safe. It wants to create hope while keeping generosity dangerous. These ideas can technically coexist. The problem begins when they compete.

For me, PvP does not merely exist beside the parts I love. It contaminates them.

I cannot calmly study ARC behavior because another player may be studying mine. I cannot enjoy exploration because attention directed toward the world is attention taken away from potential attackers. I cannot solve a puzzle without wondering whether someone is waiting for it to occupy my hands. The positive systems remain present; they are simply held hostage by another one.

A game does not need to be for everyone. This is true. No player is entitled to redesign a game around personal preference, and creative direction requires exclusion. I respect that. But the sentence works in both directions.

A game does not need to be for everyone. And everyone does not need to keep playing it.

Everyone does not need to maintain subscriptions for it, purchase cosmetics for it or organize their free time around it. I work for a living and solve problems all week. When the week ends, I sometimes want a game—not an effortless or empty one, but a world that demands my attention without demanding that I distrust everyone inside it.

I want to fight something enormous with my brother and my friend. I want to play an instrument in the ruins and carry a defibrillator because someone I have never met may need it. Instead, I increasingly feel that kindness is a build error, pacifism is poor optimization, and trust is a failure to understand the meta.

The game does not merely allow cruelty. It gives cruelty an economic model. Then it asks the generous player to call the resulting anxiety “tension.”

So this is probably goodbye. Not a dramatic deletion or a demand. I may still enter Topside occasionally, hear the music, see the landscape and remember why I cared. But the subscriptions connected to this experience no longer make sense. My time on this planet is finite, entertainment is not scarce, and there is no rational reason to keep paying for an experience that repeatedly makes me sad.

I hope ARC Raiders finds the audience that fully understands and embraces what it wants to be. I hope your strategy works. But I also hope you understand what quietly disappears when players like me leave: the flute, the shaker, the spare defibrillator, the stranger who stops to help, and the player who sees another Raider and thinks “ally” before thinking “inventory.”

Eventually, the predators may receive exactly the world they trained everyone else to expect: a world in which everyone shoots first, generosity is extinct, and only efficient, suspicious killing machines remain. Perhaps that is the purest possible expression of your design.

It is simply not the world I saw in that first trailer.

I came to ARC Raiders to fight the machines. I am leaving because the game kept insisting that I become one.