The winter abates, the days begin to lengthen, the snowdrops creep forth from their burrows, and the raiders of ARC Raiders carry on raiding Arcs. Developers Embark have also done another round of interviews, in which they discuss plans for ARC Raiders updates in 2026, and in particular, address the question of whether to implement a player-trading menu and/or some kind of auction house feature. Right now, you can only officially barter with NPC merchants.
Briefly, the developers are concerned that such features would sabotage how players themselves organically assign value and significance to particular items. They worry it would encourage us to see everything as currency – an argument that echoes thoughts to RPS from the launch period last year. They’re keen to maintain the enchantment of encountering another wanderer in the waste, and trading items by dropping them on the floor. They sort of don’t want it to feel too much like an “extraction” game, in effect. Ideally, all of that stuff needs to happen in the world itself.
“We’re not building an auction house or anything like that,” design lead Virgil Watkins told Gamesradar in an interview. “Currently, I think it’s more leaning into the aspect of social facilitation in that sense of our design.”
As an example of this “social facilitation”, the devs are looking at letting you actually hold out an object to another player, rather than chucking it at their feet (and daring them to let their guard down a fraction while they push the button to pick it up).
Watkins had more to say on the subject to PCGamesN, describing player-trading as a “very tricky aspect” of games like ARC. “You can see it in other games that have like a more traditional auction house, especially once [in-game] currency becomes involved, I think we [would] diminish one of the central aspects of our game, which is caring about the items you find and what [their] use cases are,” he said, “rather than it being: ‘I’m going to go into the world to maximize profit, take all that money out, and then just buy the things I need.’
“I think any avenue we go down in terms of player trading has to keep that in mind,” Watkins went on. “It can’t undercut what one of the primary loops of the game is, which is caring about exploring the world, finding the things you need to find, and then caring about getting those things out, rather than, you know, hoarding 3,000 Lance’s Mixtapes to sell so you can then buy all your guns on the trading market.”
Watkins does feel that Embark can do a lot more with the current NPC trading system, which obviously allows the developers to maintain direct control over the game’s economy. And if auction houses are off the menu, it’s very possible Embark will expand the off-map side of the game by turning the secret human citadel of Speranza into an actual walkable hub area.
“For me, personally, I love the vibe and aesthetic of a walkable hub, but I would want to preserve the menuing so that you can do it quickly and efficiently, rather than [having to] run to Celeste and then run to my [raider’s room], and then ‘Oops, I forgot this thing at Shani’,” Watkins told PCGamesN. “But there’s also, of course, an immersion factor to that. So yeah, it’s something we have discussed, and we’ll continue to discuss, and I think there’s definitely a good appetite on the team for it as well. It’s more about when the right moment to open that door is.”
All this aside, Embark are looking at creating more varied ARC Raiders expeditions in future. I quite like the idea of a proper trading animation, though I do worry about the possibility of an accompanying sucker punch mechanic. Sike! Perhaps if they foster enough bonhomie at the level of the animations, players could host their own impromptu auctions out in the wilderness.
