Arc Raiders is a live-service shooter, and you know what that means—skin discourse, hooray! In all seriousness, since everything became Fortnite, it’s been a real consideration. As PCG’s own Morgan Park put it in 2023, “Cosmetic Uglification is a viral affliction infecting the best shooters of our time”, and he’s not been proven wrong since.
You can rest easy, though. At least, if you take the words of design director Virgil Watkins at face value in a recent interview with PCGamesN: “What I believe to be true is that we will maintain the current aesthetic that we have,” Watkins says. “It will fit within our sensibilities of how these things look and fit within the world and inside the fiction.
“We would never, say, make a Santa Claus outfit,” Watkins continues. “But we may make something that is of our own tone and our own aesthetic that evokes a Santa Claus. That’s not even a statement that we will have a Santa Claus outfit, but I think that’s kind of the line you can draw. We’re pretty protective of making sure that anything that goes into the game fits within the visual identity, fits within the tone, fits within the setting.”
And to Watkins’ credit, Arc Raiders does a halfway decent job of having an aesthetic, one a little more flavourful than ‘generic spec-ops military’. It’s post-apocalyptic spec-ops military, which means you can already start a little buck-wild on a conceptual level, because all these raiders are just trying to get by and are picking up any old garbage.
Meaning there are raiders in fencing outfits, beekeeping suits, astronaut suits, pilot suits—or sometimes just a stylish little jacket. Basically, Embark Studios has set a solid baseline that it can deviate from without much trouble. As long as you could feasibly scavenge it, you can feasibly wear it. Well, within reason.
“I think because so much of our game is strong around that element, it would be really unfortunate to upset that by injecting, I don’t know, a T-Rex costume running around suddenly—I don’t think the novelty is worth the trade.”
To play lizard’s advocate, if I were scrambling for my life and I saw a T-Rex costume, I’d absolutely be throwing that thing on. I’m allowed a bit of joy in the dystopian future. For a game, though? They’re probably right.
At the very least, even if Arc Raiders does step over the cosmetics line, its very nature as an extraction shooter means you won’t be having medics refusing to revive you over your fugly skin. Well, unless the folks you’ve grouped up with really hate your guts, in which case you probably need to get better friends.
