Any major extraction shooter release inevitably summons the age-old debate of PvE vs. PvP. It’s been the case with ARC Raiders and DMZ, and that schism will resurface whenever the next one launches. You can always count on heated arguments stirring controversy about something that shouldn’t be controversial at all.
After all, how dare players enjoy PvE in a PvPvE game? The way the debate often goes, you’d assume it was a cardinal sin, like the PvE crowd was planning to personally tar and feather every PvP player in existence.
Instead, PvE players often just want a more forgiving, relaxed experience that does not involve getting ratted to death in Stella Montis or having to spend an entire match in Hajin with one’s butthole clenched so tightly that not even a Wi-Fi signal passes through it. And from the looks of it, this isn’t a small crowd, either.
Take ARC Raiders, for example. The demand for a PvE mode was so large that Embark tested a toggle that disabled damage between players last month. Before then, 37 percent of its fanbase (and growing) were focused on PvE cooperation, 34 were there purely for PvP (stable since launch), and 27 landed in the middle, Embark said. Over 51 percent of all surveyed users showed interest in a dedicated PvE mode, according to the studio.
If even the thought of discussing this makes you feel like Ben Affleck with a cigarette, you’re not the only one who’s exhausted. The PvE vs. PvP argument is the reheated leftovers from the skill-based matchmaking debate, annoyingly inescapable when battle royales were all the rage.
Often, the higher-skill players don’t want to match against others of similar ability because their games get too difficult and stop being fun. And yes, this is exactly what happens to lower-skill players without SBMM.
Activision ran a famous experiment with its matchmaking in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in 2024. The company loosened the skill constraints for half of its players during a month. At the end of the test, it noted that the 10 percent of affected players at the top of the skill pyramid returned more often, but the remaining 90 percent were considerably less likely to come back. And that’s with a diluted SBMM.
“If [SBMM] were completely removed, we would expect to see the player population erode rapidly in the span of a few months, resulting in a negative outcome for all our players,” the study said.
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PvP is zero-sum by definition: for one to win, another must lose. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t feel good to be on the losing side. Having the chance to opt out of that and into a different playstyle altogether shouldn’t cause this much uproar—especially not in a game where keeping gear plays a major role. And often, it doesn’t even relate exclusively to skill, but the type of experience one wants to have.
This time, it’s not even a matter of catering to one part of the audience in detriment of another, which would be an understandable concern if it made a modicum of sense. Embark isn’t going to make your fingers fall off every time you shoot another player. Having PvE in DMZ won’t make Activision cease content for Warzone or multiplayer, otherwise CoD Zombies wouldn’t exist.
Often, the people contemplated by PvE mode aren’t even in the game, but they’re yearning to be. The lack of full-on PvE in DMZ didn’t make me flock to multiplayer; it made me uninstall the game altogether. I only bought ARC Raiders because of the PvE test and the game’s aggression-based matchmaking. If that went away, I’d disappear with it. My friends did so the second the PvE test ended, and they’re eagerly waiting for the mode to return.
Extraction shooters being unapproachable made sense when they were niche. Now that every live-service seems to flirt with the genre, though, they should be more welcoming, especially if they want to draw a larger crowd.
As an avid frequenter of friendly lobbies in ARC Raiders, I’ve had more positive experiences with randoms than I can count, and that’s a big reason why I open the game. I’m having one hell of a time fighting Matriarchs, defibbing other raiders, and dropping duplicate blueprints. My archenemy was a cat bed, and I’m thrilled this was the case. It sucks when it’s tooth-and-nail all the time, as every big opponent of SBMM will tell you.
The difference is, unlike hero shooters or battle royales, extraction shooters already have a PvE element baked into them, no retrofitting required. Of course, you may have to reshuffle some things, like increasing the difficulty of the AI-controlled enemies to raise the threat and keep players on their toes. But it’s different from creating something entirely new, like if people wanted bots in Apex Legends or full-blooded PvP in the extraction-adjacent Helldivers 2. And it’s certainly not too much to ask.
There’s a reason extraction shooters were somewhat obscure before the gaming industry threw a borderline infinite amount of money at making the genre mainstream. Soulslikes aside, not everyone wants to get their teeth kicked in as a pastime. Sure, the cutthroat uncertainty from PvPvE shaped the identity of ARC Raiders, but there are ways to evoke that without fighting other players, as Helldivers 2 and GTFO have proved.
ARC Raiders has come a long way in the past year, in no small part because of the 37 percent of PvE players (and in bigger part because of the 63 percent of other raiders). Maybe the burgeoning PvE scene changes the vision of the game somewhat, and that’s fine. DMZ getting a fully PvE mode wouldn’t be entirely out of the realm of possibility, considering that’s basically what MWZ was. That’s the beauty and bane of live services: there’s always room for reinvention.
