(Image credit: Embark Studios)

Arc Raiders was one of last year's nicest surprises, a chilled PvEvP extraction shooter that's constantly surprising, challenging, and… well, OK, it's got one problem for me. It's on the crafting and upgrades side. I hate inventory management and Arc Raiders is particularly bad at it: You're constantly bottlenecked on upgrades by a shortage of some items, while at the same time having an overabundance of other things you may or may not need later.

Yes, it's deliberate and by design. But other extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov, despite being on a different level of brutality than Arc Raiders, at least have a player economy where you can fudge through some of the worst by selling and buying. Despite Arc Raiders being quite happy to connect players in-game, there's no means to swap or sell key items in order to get the stuff you really need. I think that, within reason, it's a problem the game should seek to address—and it seems to me that every player would be all-in on it.

Anyway, in an interview with Games Beat, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund talked about player to player trading and the news is that, basically, it will be coming. But not soon:

"We're going to want to do more of that because it's fun, it's a good part of the game, and I agree with you, we should do more with the trading part of the game," says Söderlund. "Also, allow people to trade amongst each other etc. I think it's fun. We absolutely have to look at it long term. We haven't decided on anything yet, but that's the fun part of building something like this. This is really the start of something, and there are so many things that we can look into adding to the game."

(Image credit: Embark Studios)

That's a confirmation they'll "do more" but not much else. Which is fine as a start, but I hope Embark is setting it as a priority, because Arc Raiders needs this kind of trading system that Söderlund is here only talking about in vagaries. But there are a lot of other things to do too.

"The list [of things to add] is constantly changing as we monitor how people play the game, what they like, what they don't like, what they're doing, what they're not doing; the list isn't static," says Söderlund. "We have to change it as we go. It's fun, for me it's a fun part of building games today, because we can build them this way, they're different from what they were before. You can build them out and have them live for a long time. I, for one, want to spend more time in this universe and get to know Arcs and why they are there."

I, for one, am thinking that the guy behind Arcs already knows Arcs, and why they are there, perfectly well.

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