If you play ARC Raiders often enough to make its maps feel like they’ve become a tad too familiar, this is exciting news for you.
Virgil Watkins, the game’s Design Director, has announced in a Twitch stream that dynamic loot zones are coming to Pendola Pass in the Frozen Trail, which means you’re going to see those red and yellow POIs switching around every time you visit the area. That should make planning runs more interesting every time you pop in to that particular map.
“This has been requested on and off over time; we are trying it in Frozen Trail, specifically on the Pendola Pass map. So if you’re familiar with [ARC Raiders], you know it will have on the map, like, yellow and red zones to indicate the overall loot value of that area, and we’re trying a system where, session to session, it mixes those around. So, if, say, one POI was high value last session, you may come to the next session, and it would have swapped to medium, and then another one goes high.”
It’s an interesting experiment from Embark, which doesn’t seem afraid to try new things in a formula that has proven to be quite successful for the studio. There’s the new PvE effort, for instance, that’s scheduled to take the PvP element out of the equation for those of you who’d like to cooperate without worrying about getting shot in the back later on. Of course, one might argue that it goes against the spirit of the game, but it’s still nice to see the developers work to find common ground between what their players want and their own creative vision for what it should be.
We really liked ARC Raiders when we reviewed it at launch, and the feeling hasn’t changed despite it being around for a while, thanks to how well it has managed to keep the lot of us on our toes since then. Frozen Trail is out on October 8th, so stay tuned for more details.
