If you’re any kind of ARC Raiders fan, you’ll know the situation with free loadouts, a mechanic in the game that allows users to enter a raid with a randomized kit. It’s a point of contention, as it has almost no downsides for the user taking the kit, but plenty of concerns for those who meet said player.
For the longest time, players more geared towards taking in ‘paid kits’ and running into other players to fight them have requested Embark Studios examine how they manage this mechanic, and now, months after launch, that has finally happened.
Free Loadouts Being Removed (Kind of) From ARC Raiders
In the latest ARC Raiders update, Embark Studios revealed it’s testing the removal of free loadouts, but only under certain conditions.
Those conditions are map conditions, and for the next three weeks, anyone loading into the Night Raid or Close Scrutiny conditions will find that they can only do so if they’re running a paid kit. There will be no free kit functionality on these map conditions for the next three weeks.
This is a test-bed event, with Embark Studios assessing how players react to this action before presumably rolling it out across other map conditions and criteria.
In an ideal world (my world, I guess), you’d have no free loadouts on any map condition, leaving only the players with paid kits and a bit of effort in their build to saunter into these more challenging environments.
The team wrote in the patch notes for the 1.33.0 update for ARC Raiders:
We are disabling free loadouts for Night Raid and Close Scrutiny to increase the barrier of entry so that players commit to appropriate risk and reward in these scenarios that have better loot.
This is a time limited change that we will be testing for the next three weeks. We may add this limitation to more map conditions in the future after we’ve observed its impact and analyzed your feedback.
Do you think this change is a huge win? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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