(Image credit: Embark Studios)

MORGAN PARK, STAFF WRITER

(Image credit: Future)

Last week: Finished Act 2 of Baldur's Gate 3 as Dark Urge and realized I missed out on half of that game the first time around.

I got back into Arc Raiders this week expecting disappointment. After a nice long break from PvP games in December, it felt inevitable that the unlikely chill that defined Arc Raiders' community at launch would have eroded to more cynical, typical skirmishes over two months later. Surely as a larger pile of peaceful players checked off their final quests, cultivated stockpiles of valuables, or reset their progress altogether, they would turn to ruthless PvP as a means for variety. Nope.

It seemed almost absurd that a competitive shooter could keep it up, until Embark confirmed in a recent interview with Games Beat that aggression-based matchmaking is very much real. That's according to Embark head honcho Patrick Söderlund, who described the system (which was apparently implemented in a recent backend update) in no uncertain terms.

"We introduced a system where we also matchmake based on how prone you are to PvP or PvE. So if your preference is to do PvE and you have less conflict with players … you'll get more matched up [with that sort of play]. Obviously, it's not a full science."

That explains so much. It explains why my lobbies are so nice—I have fewer than 15 player kills over 50+ hours, and they were all self-defense—and why half of the people I've talked to about Arc Raiders say it's just as bloody and cold as the next shooter. Is it regional? Is it platform-specific? Maybe a bit, but there's no doubt now that it's our own behavior steering the experience.

Judgy

I get why, faced with this unfamiliar rubric, some players are feeling unfairly judged for engaging in PvP (especially in trios, where group strength mentality naturally leads to more conflict). It's an odd thing to be "penalized" for making the valid choice to shoot in a multiplayer shooter, but those people are looking at it the wrong way. The incentives of even the least prescriptive competitive shooters out there—Hunt: Showdown and Escape From Tarkov—don't care if or how you kill, only how skilled the opponents were. On that familiar scale, the K/D ratio is a purely positive status symbol.