Why ‘Arc Raiders’ Is Not Getting A First-Person Mode Despite Requests

Shirda – The Return Of Raskar Kapac on Juno Download

October 22, 2025

Upgrade – Shamans on Juno Download

October 23, 2025

Published by Kelompokkan kembali catatan on October 22, 2025

Tags

I’ve heard the refrain frequently that while Arc Raiders interests a lot of shooter players, even ones not into extraction games, that they just can’t get behind it being a third-person game. I can relate, I don’t love third-person shooters compared to FPSs, but in this case, it’s just not going to happen with Arc Raiders. Embark is now being clear that it’s not in the cards.

Third-person play is baked into the core of the game. It’s not just a matter of switching perspectives and everything being fine. Here’s design director Virgil Walkins talking to PC Gamer about how first-person is “very, very implausible”:

“[Third-person] did work so well for us that we never even really looked at first person. And I know there are hybrid models, like Helldivers 2 and a few other games, but I think for us to try to do that, it would cause us to have to re-evaluate so much of how our areas are built and the way they’re laid out, because you get very specific sight lines once you go first person.”

Everything is designed to accommodate the over-the-shoulder perspective and “once you start being able to put your face right up against an asset, it kind of falls apart,” he says.

If you’ve played Arc Raiders, you can see what he means. While a game like Helldivers 2 is a lot of chaos and very little sneaking around and hiding behind things, line of sight is enormously important for the slower-paced extraction genre here, and switching perspective breaks the game in ways that almost can’t be fixed.

This isn’t to say you can’t do an extraction shooter as an FPS with that in mind to start. That’s what Bungie is doing with Marathon, continuing its tradition of Halo and Destiny (minus say, holding swords in Destiny, which creates…PvP line of sight problems), but the game is designed for that to begin with, so it wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Marathon is also meant to be at least a little more action-oriented than Arc, which FPS works well for.

It does not seem worthwhile to damage many of the core reasons that Arc Raiders gameplay works in order to attract fans who wish it was an FPS instead. While I understand traditional FPS gamers being reluctant to go third-person, you would be at a significant disadvantage if that were actually an option, given how the game works. I would try to look past that and get used to the game as it is, but if it causes you to skip it, hey, Marathon is five-ish months away, I guess.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.