I find myself in a field picking olives, I who hate nature, I who don’t leave the house because I have everything I need at home (as long as the Wi-FI and Glovo work), I who have never done manual work (even if you have to attach a painting I call someone to attach it for me) apart from typing keys on a computer, what am I doing here? The sky is gorgeous, a splendid sunny day, the light filters through the clouds, the air seems still and there is a light breeze and I bend over the ground that doesn’t get me dirty and I hear a voice telling me “Stop, you’re going to shoot me? Don’t move”. I turn around, and this guy with a huge backpack says to me, pointing a rifle at me: “I don’t want to shoot you, I want to pick olives with you”. Have I gone crazy? Did I go crazy all of a sudden? No, I’ll explain now.
As my readers know, for years I have only been playing Call of Duty, certainly not always the same maps (every year they change but the soup, let’s face it, is always the same, Activision has been living off the income for almost two decades) and while waiting for Black Ops 7, the new Cod, which will be released on November 14th, I diverted to this ARC Raiders that everyone was talking about, and not because everyone is talking about it (indeed, when everyone talks about something I avoid it). I wanted if it really wasn’t just about killing anymore but about putting up with each other, at least for the time necessary to stay alive, and also because the setting reminded me so much of Fallout, a game I loved before I became obsessed with Cod.
ARC Raiders was created by Embark Studios, the Swedish company founded by former Battlefield developers, and in just a few days it became the most discussed phenomenon on Reddit and Twitch and Discord and Youtube and in short everyone playing ARC Riders, everyone crazy not for Mary but for ARC Riders, everyone saying it was a unique experience, even streamers I trust, like the Ukrainian ancient eater and peanut eater Kyborg (the only famous streamer who answers my phone when I I stalk), and with saturated servers and players who say they have “become another person” (this convinced me to try, since I can’t stand myself anymore and if I can really become another person I’ll put my signature on it, especially if I can do it without getting up from the sofa).
Plot: we are on a devastated planet where the surface is controlled by machines, the ARCs, while humans survive underground in the colony called Hope, rising to the surface only to raid resources and then return alive, if they succeed. The usual post-apocalyptic soup, but that’s not the point.
The setting (many say) is inspired by Naples and Campania: Everyeye and Multiplayer.it, for example, have recognized glimpses of the Galleria Umberto I among the post-apocalyptic ruins, the signs of the Toledo metro, names like Acerra Spaceport and a volcano that looks like Vesuvius, and even TV Sorrisi e Canzoni wrote that “it is indeed the Neapolitan city, even if it will be difficult to recognize it”. Oh well, it’s not that I entered there for this, I have all my relatives in Naples and I never go there, as Alberto Arbasino said in his masterpiece Fratelli d’Italia “never go further south than Milan”, and I already live in Rome, where buses burn and monuments collapse.
Among other things, Embark has never declared it openly, it would be more correct to say that it is a Naples-in-future-version, a Naples filtered through the Nordic imagination, a southern Italy made alien by machines and time, in any case Naples or not Naples who cares.
ARC Raiders belongs to the extraction shooter genre: games in which it’s not whoever kills the most who wins, but rather whoever manages to get out alive with what they’ve collected, so each incursion is a timed journey where you go down and explore and fight and accumulate and try to extract everything you’ve found before someone more armed arrives or the machines kill you.
The loot system forces you to search for endless materials, such as aluminum, copper, iron, silicon, synthetic fibers, fuel, batteries, boards, valves, chips, bolts, panels, optical components, technical fabrics, compressed plastic, and sometimes even biological substances of unknown origin, and everything serves a purpose, especially to build weapons, repair modules, upgrade drones, and improve equipment. The more things you take away, the more you can improve your equipment, unless you are killed during exploration, by machines (the ARCs) or by other players.
So the enemies are both the machines and other players, and here comes the interesting aspect, as the other players often gang up on you (especially if you play alone, in single player). Sociological reflection: humanity comes together instinctively, whoever has just shot you stands by your side, whoever stole your loot is attacked by an ARC who also attacks you and covers your back and you cover him and we cover each other and make friends.
In short, I collect everything I find (everything is useful) and yes, even olives, and why I was collecting olives like an idiot in a field I discovered on the battlefield, talking to other players who didn’t shoot me and begged me not to shoot them: those olives that I had searched for hours, among drones and scrap, were used to feed a rooster, Scrappy, who lives in Speranza and will be your digital ally.
I don’t know, maybe ARC Raiders really is the video game of the moment not because it changes the way of shooting or the mechanics of the type of game (in third person, moreover, I hate the third person, both in my novels and in video games), nor because the graphics are beautiful, perhaps it forces you to discover that we do the same in life too: the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend, especially if the enemy has other interests than killing me. For goodness sake, I suspect that this situation will not last long, the game has only been out for a week and in a month everyone will become more expert and nastier, it’s better to take advantage of it (in a week I’ll already be back to Call of Duty).
A popular phrase comes to mind, when they tell you, to denigrate you, “go pick olives”. Apart from the fact that if there weren’t anyone picking the olives we wouldn’t have the oil, but now I’m going back to picking olives, I’m a writer, not a farmer, but Scrappy is hungry and I need his help.