Unpopular opinion: The Survivor / Free Kit meta is EXTREMELY boring
Now before anyone threatens to kill my dog because I think their favorite augment is "broken", hear me out: I don’t have a problem with the Survivor augment itself (free kit is a whole different story tho). I’m actually all in favor of the game being EXTREMELY casual-friendly. We need a large and stable playerbase if we want Embark to keep the game alive for years, and that playerbase absolutely includes PvE-leaning casuals who don’t want to constantly lose everything because they made a mistake, and Survivor solves that.
Survivor helps reduce the fear of loss in care bear lobbies, since there you're almost immortal. If you mess up, just crawl to the extract for like 10 minutes or try asking for help, and most likely a good samaritan with a defib will show up. You won't lose anything besides your time. And honestly, that’s completely FINE. Casual players are necessary for the long-term health of the game, and giving them tools to reduce frustration is not a bad thing.
The problem is what happens when one single augment becomes so dominant that everything else stops making sense.
Right now, those who can access friendly lobbies will often see something that looks like this: players running around completely naked, sprinting to hotspots hoping to find something worth putting deep inside their… safe pockets, and if they don’t find the Survivor augment, they just off themselves and repeat the process.
Like rn we literally have some naked schizos speedrunning this loop because that is the optimal strategy to get the ONLY augment that actually matters.
That is not engaging gameplay. And yeah, you're not required to do this, but the simple fact that this happens all the time, to me, is a symptom of a system where only one choice feels relevant and everything else is filler.
But like I said, THAT'S OK, it's a problem to be addressed later. The biggest issue is that there is no real PvP counterpart, an augment that encourages casual, low-skilled, or simply scared players to engage with PvP in a healthy way, not the "F around and find out" way that we have with free kits right now.
Yes, TECHNICALLY Safekeeper does indeed exist, you're right mate. But in practice, Safekeeper is almost useless.
The only realistic use case for Safekeeper right now is encouraging you to give up the fight after your squad got smoked, hide your weapon DEEP into the safe pocket, and accept your fate (like a b). That is not exciting gameplay. That is not encouraging measured risk-taking. That is not encouraging PvP engagement or skill improvement.
And don't even let me get started on how Safekeeper is even more useless for controller players. Moving items into the safe pocket during actual gameplay is clunky at best. There is no quick way to store your weapon like you have with mouse and keyboard. You will be actively fighting the interface while someone is actively kicking your ass.
Meanwhile, the optimal PvP “meta” augment ends up being free kit spam.
Free kits are already EXTREMELY STRONG for something that COSTS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and has no cooldown. You shouldn’t be spawning with a shield, let alone being able to threaten fully geared players in any meaningful way. You should be able to hold yourself against some PvE so you can loot, but be the scrap at the bottom of the barrel in PvP. The result is PvP lobbies with zero consequences, where players can queue with zero investment, zero fear, and zero incentive to improve. They can literally doom-scroll TikTok while doing that. Everything is a profit and they can lose nothing.
No risk means no tension. No tension means no meaningful reward for everyone involved.
Right now, I can’t convince any of my 9–5 friends to bring a proper loadout into PvP. The moment high-level gear is involved, the risk of losing it feels unjustified compared to the reward, ESPECIALLY when 80% of the lobby is running free kits anyway. Most of the time, looting other players isn’t even worth the effort. Not to mention that rarer weapons are way more fun, but not that much more effective than some of the most common ones, all while being WAY more expensive to maintain.
So what happens?
People keep their Tempests and Jupiters safely stored to show off in care bear lobbies while running Survivor, making the risk of losing them basically minimal.
And Safekeeper, the augment that could theoretically encourage casual, low-skilled players to bring real gear into PvP, fails at doing its job.
So Safekeeper becomes double useless:
• weak as a PvP incentive
• frustrating to use on controller
• unable to compete with Survivor’s safety net
• unable to compete with the zero-risk nature of free kits
The end result is a meta where:
• PvE-leaning players default to Survivor because there is no reason not to
• PvP players default to free kits because there is no reason to risk anything
• bringing fun weapons feels actively discouraged
• most encounters feel low-stakes and repetitive
And yeah mate, it's an extraction shooter, BUT the game already includes extremely casual-friendly protection mechanics for your gear through Survivor. So the argument that Arc Raiders must strictly follow hardcore extraction genre rules no longer really applies here.
If casual-friendly mechanics already exist for PvE-leaning players, then it makes sense to also have a casual-friendly entry point for PvP that still preserves tension and meaningful loss, NOT THE GOD DAMN FREE KIT.
A possible direction would be a Safekeeper rework that protects ONE selected item from the start of the match while still allowing you to use said item. This should come with heavy downsides to keep things balanced:
• very limited inventory space
• limited carry capacity
• high crafting cost
• making it mandatory that you bring 2 weapons or meet a minimum value requirement, idk
• inability to CHANGE the protected item mid-game (Just found that one BP that you've been looking for for a whole week? Well mate, now it's your time to prove that you deserve it, cuz there's no Safe Pocket for you and only like 8 inventory spaces. Good luck taking the last elevator at the night raid)
And it could be the worst idea ever, but hey, I'm not being paid to find the solution to the problem mate, that's Embark's deal. I just know that SOMETHING needs to change.
But at least doing something like that would allow the player who killed you to get AT LEAST some loot, because right now looting most players or even whole squads is not even worth the time. And you will still experience loss. But you don’t lose your dear Clari... I mean you don't lose your lv4 Tempest, which is a fun weapon that you genuinely enjoy using, that is at this exact moment gathering dust back in Speranza because you just cannot get over the fear of losing her. You put your sweet Clarice in your bed every day and whisper, assuring her that no other raider will ever put their dirty hands on your darling...
Right now, losing your favorite weapon often forces you into two extremes:
either you try doing looting runs to craft another weapon in some paranoid, KOS, free-kit-spamming lobbies, or you abuse ABMM to farm in the Care-Bear Wonderland, while the bears help you recover emotionally from losing Clarice by dropping something like 8 Bobcat blueprints and an Equalizer for you.
Neither of those outcomes is particularly engaging gameplay (the care bear one isn't that bad, but you get the point). You're either spamming free kits yourself or gaming the system to your advantage. I mean, with our current circumstances I cannot blame you. In most cases, there is zero reward in PvP lobbies due to free kits. You're risking your loot for absolutely nothing aside from being able to dunk on someone while they scream peak MW2-era slurs at you.
The thing is, Embark already proved that it is willing to bend genre conventions in favor of accessibility. They understand that Arc already transcends the hardcore extraction shooter crowd. Because Survivor does EXACTLY that: it minimizes frustration for casuals while encouraging them to USE THE FUN WEAPONS and GADGETS. The only thing they really lose is time, and THAT'S OK. One day they will feel like they aren't in the mood to crawl all the way across the map for 10 minutes just to save some 53-durability Bobcat. They will just take the loss and recover their gear while PLAYING THE GAME for 10 minutes. But until that day comes, Survivor will be there.
A reworked Safekeeper could do the same for PvP, encouraging players to bring interesting, fun weapons that they like while still risking REAL GEAR, instead of defaulting to zero-investment, zero-consequences gameplay loops that bring nothing of value to literally everyone else involved, including themselves. Because again, they have zero to lose and no reason to improve their skills if a lucky third-party shot on a geared raider is all they need.
Because that's what the system that we have right now encourages.
It’s repetitive.
It’s low stakes.
It discourages experimentation and improvement.
It absolutely doesn't reward those who are risking something.
and is BORING as F.
Posted Apr 6, 2026, 12:54 AM UTC