At some point in development, Arc Raiders devs actually partially built a functional auction-house style trading system. It didn’t take long for the team to realize this type of system clashed with one of the core game loops, though.
Why An Auction House Would Ruin Arc Raiders
What makes Arc Raiders so special isn’t just the player interactions and emergent gameplay moments. The game’s incredible world-building makes the community feel like every journey topside is a true risk and adventure. Searching every crate, storage locker, or downed ARC adds to the immersion, as players pick up items where they would logically be found.
As the game grows in popularity and the player base increases, there are some fans who feel a built-in trading system would add a major quality of life improvement for convenience. Although that is true, the devs want to be careful to not make the game about currency, rather than about loot.
Arc Raiders design lead Virgil Watkins spoke with GamesRadar in a recent interview and discussed the early exploration of a more sophisticated trading system:
“We put a lot of very, very deliberate effort into making the game about the items. We previously explored and even partially built a trading system like [an auction house]. But what it ended up doing is it turned the game into just being about coins. Going in and finding items that are worth the most value, changing them in [for coins], and just buying the things you want.
“Now you have very little care about going in, exploring the correct location, and searching the right containers, or feeling cool that, ‘Oh, finally, I needed this thing, and now I can go do the other thing I wanted to do with it.’”
What Do the Devs See as the future of trading in ARc Raiders?
Although the team does not want to pursue an auction house-style trading system, the developers are interested in building out support for other kinds of trading in Arc Raiders.
Watkins explained that, “One thing we really wanted to do, and may still try to do, is: it’s fine to trade by just dropping something on the floor, and you can pick it up, but we really want to do an offer where you hold it out and someone actually interacts with the thing in your hand to take it from you. And it’s kind of a small thing, but it feels a lot better than, ‘Here’s your thing I threw on the floor for you.’ So I think it’s things on those ends.”
It’s encouraging that the Arc Raiders team are aware of this desire from the community and have a sound logic behind the approach they want to take when making more support for trading in the extraction shooter.
Arc Raiders is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles. Players can now review the Cold Snap by the numbers recap.
The post Arc Raiders Devs Experimented With Auction House-Style Trading, Here Is Why They Scrapped It appeared first on VICE.
