Jake emerges from the underground city of Speranza to see whether gamers are cooperating online again. Rumors of friendly behavior and positive community vibes have brought the new videogame “Arc Raiders” under close scrutiny. Are we capable of putting aside our differences and taking on the robots together once and for all?
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com)
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QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QA podcast premium episode 312, Ark Raiders Dilemma.
As always, we are your host, Jake Rakotansky, Liv Akar, and Travis View.
Folks, every now and then, I'll see something on X, formerly known as Twitter, that spurs me to want to try and take on a very ambitious episode with ideally less than 48 hours turnaround time.
This week, that inspiration came from a tweet from one of my mutual friends on X who identified that the popular video game Ark Raiders is essentially just a post-apocalyptic online version of the prisoner's dilemma, and that the once happy community of Raiders has almost overnight melted down into various factions of complainers and rulemakers, each trying to shape the landscape of the game moving forward to their liking.
Now, it's worth noting that my interest didn't exist in a vacuum.
By the time I had seen the tweet, I had already purchased the game, played two prior technical tests, and been keen to play in full since the game was first announced at the Game Awards in December of 2021.
And I gotta say, that's fucking shameful that they make us wait four years to play these games nowadays.
Why can't they just announce it like, and it's coming out tomorrow?
Was this one that had like a long alpha, like pre-release, and then it's finally released?
Because they love their alphas that you can play for some reason.
Yeah, it's like, it's like a way to get like free, like quality assurance testers, basically.
You could just like open up the game and like have, you know, 10,000 people rush in to play it.
And then they go to the Reddit to complain or the Discord to complain and there, boom, you've got all your bugs.
I remember the days when a new box would show up at Blockbuster and you would be forced to decide by the cover art and four tiny gameplay images on the back alone whether you wanted to burn your game rental on Batman, Return of the Joker, a very hard game, or stick with something you knew was good, like the True Lies adaptation for Genesis.
My big one was Battlefront, Star Wars Battlefront, one and two.
Oh, hell yeah.
Get that for the weekend.
Play with my friend.
It was great.
I loved those games.
I loved in the original ones, which you can't do in the new ones, but you could go from ground to air without, you know, you could like shoot two guys with a gun and then jump into a spaceship and all of a sudden you're fighting TIE Fighters outside.
I like that you could go to both.
They changed that in the newer games.
Yeah, it's a shame.
You know, you can get the old Battlefronts now.
They re-released them.
I don't think they, I don't think people were happy with them.
People were mad about it.
It was kind of slop.
It was sloppy release where they didn't give you much.
Per usual, they never give us anything fucking good anymore.
I know.
Furthermore, I'm consistently trying to return the podcast to me and Julian's original podcast about video games, which had approximately 40 listeners.
So with him not here to deny me of this, I will move ahead accordingly.
I'm just trying to do, I'm like, this podcast too successful, doing too well.
We got to go back to the video game podcast that nobody listened to and was objectively not so good.
What if you were right close?
You know, the meme of the guy mining and he's like close to diamonds and he's walking away.
What if that was you guys with the video game podcast?
Fuck!
Oh my God.
And we've just been walking away like for like years since.
Like I feel like this show is just me walking away from sanity.
Are you guys familiar with Ark Raiders at all?
I'm sure you've seen like the Mar.
I'll bet Liv's probably a little bit more familiar than Travis's, but there's been a massive marketing push and it's got kind of like rainbowy colors and a sort of like 80s film grain type of sort of vibe to it.
Is it like kind of giving Rust a little bit?
And there's like dinosaurs.
A little bit.
It's like, it's a little bit like Rust in that the it's kind of like steam junky, you know, sort of like top side, post-apocalyptic player versus player.
There's no base building, unlike Rust.
It's not first person.
It's a third person game only.
And it's round-based, unlike Rust, which is, which is basically just kind of like open servers.
And I think they wipe the servers every month or every two months.
But this, each round lasts about 30 minutes.
Similar kind of idea, though, of like you get into a clan of people and then you kill other people and it's like kind of tribal warfare.
Yeah, that's an element of it.
We'll get into it.
Okay.
So Ark Raiders is a third-person extraction shooter that imagines a future where the surface of the earth is patrolled by Ark, hostile robots that range in size from a soccer ball to a spider the size of a house to massive titans the size of small towns, all of which you can engage and fight.
It launched on October 30th of this year to massive success with over 260,000 consecutive players on Steam alone.
So that doesn't include PlayStation and Xbox.
In the game's first weekend, it crushed that record with over 350,000 consecutive Steam players.
And as of November 9th, Ark Raiders had over 462,000 players.
Just a massive success.
You know, part of me wonders if it has to do a little bit with the pricing.
This is a $40 game as opposed to a $70, you know, triple-A title.
This title feels AAA to me.
I don't know what makes it not.
I don't know why the price point is where it is, but that could have something to, you know, to do with it.
This does make me feel kind of unk because I feel like I used to know when all the big games release.
And I like, I remember hearing about this, but I didn't, like, there's been nothing on any of my social media timelines about this release.
That's a good idea.
It's so crazy.
In the last like half a month.
I wonder if unknown happens in seasons.
Like, I wonder if as you're kind of like cresting, like cresting into like unk territory, like I'm somehow on the other side of the hill cresting down.
Like my, my unkness, like maybe you become an unk from like 27 to 42 and then like from 42 till dead.
Yeah, you're like, I want to get back into the meang you.
You're like back to being cool again.
Yeah.
You're like a kid again.
You're cool.
I think so.
I think that's how it works.
I'm on my Benjamin Button shit, you know?
So much like Helldivers, the game has, quote, gone viral with loads of streamers finding that the game's finely tuned balance of player versus player versus robots results in spectacular cinematic moments.
But unlike Helldivers, where the bugs go squish under the weight of your massive firepower, Ark Raiders' weapons leave a lot to be desired.
They don't carry a lot of bullets.
They're slow to reload and not very accurate.
Even worse, most of them barely do damage to the robots who can kill you almost instantly.
There's one spider robot the size of a tank capable of leaping miles through the air to destroy you and anyone next to you.
Is this like a avatar thing where it's like you can imagine being a part of the global proletariat fighting like America Kakin Imperialism?
It's like, God, it's so hard to, because the lore itself, I did a little bit of a deep dive into the lore.
I didn't want to bore listeners with that, but there were like two apocalypses.
Like basically, there was a climate disaster and all of the like Earth's like elite basically went into space to go live on Mars or go live on another planet.
And then like everybody else was basically left to like duke it out amidst this like climate disaster.
And basically what happened was that there was like human beings had started to rebuild.
The climate disaster, the world had kind of reset.
Things were kind of coming back to normal.
And then these like, these, this like wave of artificially intelligent robots basically comes down from the sky and there's like a huge war.
And the humans are able to actually fight off this first wave of arc, as they're called, these intelligent, sort of like cyber intelligent beings, whatever, whatever they are.
They're not really explained.
And then the arc come back and they're like years and years and years later and they're way more advanced and they force humans to sort of live underground.
And that's where the game takes place.
So we're at like the very tail end of two apocalypses and a second, you know, a second global conflict with these extraterrestrial robots.
I see in there, I guess the arc are presumably from the like Elon Musk rich people who escaped from Mars.
Yeah, potentially.
There's a couple different theories.
Some people think they're just like flat out like an alien rate, an alien race.
Other people think that they're, yeah, robots that we invented that eventually turned on us or that Elon brought with him to Mars that have now killed Elon and everybody that he brought with him and now they've come here.
So, I mean, the latter is probably the funniest scenario.
Yes, absolutely.
It is, it is a part of, I think, a long string of like media and games.
It's basically like Americans desire to be a part of the Viet Cong.
Yeah, like to be, yeah, to like essentially be part of the resistance.
And that's sort of like what it feels like.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com/slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julia and the Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverse with Julia and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com/slash QAA.
