The chilled-out extraction shooter Arc Raiders was one of 2025’s surprise hits, and for my money is a game that works because it gets so many small things right. The length of runs is perfect, there’s the perfect amount of distractions to regularly pull you away from the best-laid plans, and the exhilaration of making it out never gets old. And yet… man, do I dislike my inventory.
It’s slightly weird that a game that gets so much bang-on fumbles when it comes to inventory management and loadouts. Your stash is a key part of these games: it’s what you’re going in for, after all. But I really find it a bit of a pain sometimes in Arc Raiders, especially when I just want to get back in there without clicking through 15 screens and working out what I can and can’t recycle or sell. It’s the one bit of the game’s rhythm that feels off.
Turns out I’m far from alone. Arc Raiders design lead Virgil Watkins told PCG sister site GamesRadar+ that Embark Studios is “super aware” of players’ gripes around loadouts and shuffling items around between runs. And with regard to the game lacking custom loadouts, which players could quickly shuffle between runs, he says “we’ve talked about” them and it’s on the list.
“Similar to things like the Expedition, a lot of it was just developers and time available up to launch,” says Watkins. “Now it’s just really feeling out how we can prioritize it against other known things we need to do, or swapping priorities of something we were going to do with this based on what’s feasible.”
As for that Arc Raiders thing where you just go in using the free loadout because you can’t be bothered to sort through your stash? “I’ve literally done the same thing,” admits Watkins, “where I’m like, ‘I’m just gonna go free this time, guys, let’s just go and get in there and do stuff.’ It’s completely acknowledged.”
Watkins adds that he “won’t speak for our UI/UX team” but says saved loadouts would be “a completely valuable thing, where it just attempts to do its best job to fulfill your request with your loadout. It’s like, ‘Well, you’re short on this resource and that resource, here’s what you get,’ that type of thing.”
It does seem odd that something that would instantly improve the experience, and doesn’t really involve any meaningful change beyond basically auto-sorting a specific part of your inventory, isn’t even higher on the priority list.
“We’ve already done what we can to get the matchmaking and stuff as fast as possible,” says Watkins. “So if we can, not to say keep you out of the front end, but get you through the front end faster, I think that’s a great ambition too. Because you’re like, let’s get back in there. And you know, there’s points in games where friction is good, and spending time is good, and making you be attentive is good. Looking through a bunch of menus isn’t necessarily it.”
Amen to that. I’ve done my time in the inventory salt mines, and you can just instantly feel when a game’s got it right and when something isn’t quite right. The best part of Arc Raiders is undoubtedly being out on the surface, messing around with killer robots and hoovering up all that lovely loot. Anything that gives you more of that per hour, and less sorting through consumables and putting together a basic setup, has to be a great thing.
