I'll admit, like many of you, I'm sure I am one of the many who have become obsessed with Ark Raiders. Before playing, I honestly wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy the game. I haven't really been able to get into extraction shooters as a genre.
But what's interesting is that not only is the game play great, there is some really interesting lore and world building to the universe if you know where to look. Arc Raiders is a cool mix of Fallout with its retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic setting and also Horizon Zero Dawn where you're essentially operating among the ruins of a much greater society. In today's video, we'll take a look at both the world building and the ongoing narrative of Ark Raiders while also theorizing on the destruction of Earth and the appearance of the Arcs.
[music] All right, so let's get to the basic premise. Ark Raiders is set in a post-apocalyptic future where mysterious robots dubbed by humanity as arcs rule the surface of a destroyed Earth while humans are forced underground. So far, visits to the surface of the planet seem to take place on what is almost certainly modern-day Italy, while the raiders we play as reside in the underground city of Toledo.
The underground retreat is also sometimes referred to as Spiranza with Toledo, I believe, being the name for the overall city and Spironza, the portion where the player resides. At this point, the big question is, well, what happened? The game actually leaves that fairly vague, and it's almost certain that more reveals will come as the game lives on.
However, through both the in-game codecs and world building through the map, we can get a decent idea of what happened while also filling in the gaps with theories. So, our first bit of confusion comes right off the bat. Timeline.
The introductory cutscene for the game implies that the modern ark story begins in 2180. However, the website is more clear and says that 2180 was the date of what became known as the collapse. The current events of Ark readers take place some far time after the collapse, stated by the game to be at least generations.
During the collapse, the Earth became nearly uninhabitable following massive climate change. The planet we know was ravaged by earthquakes, wildfires, flooding as the air became polluted and the planet desolate. Now, this is going to be a confusing point, so try to pay attention because there are several nearapocalyptic events preceding the game's current story, but much of what you see when you jump into Ark Raiders on the surface would have been from this pre-colapse era.
And I actually believe that this is why some of the technology is inacronistic, but I'll come back to that in a second. What we do know is that human survivors were split up into two groups. Those who escaped to space on incredibly advanced rockets and those left to survive on what at that point was a dying planet.
It seems like, by the way, things were really bad. Think of something like the road. People were surviving and having to completely alter their way of living in the harshest conditions possible with no hope for society's return.
Humanity's time in the darkness has rendered the pre-colapse technological age as one mixed in reality and myth, especially given that some of our greatest inventions went to the stars during the human exodus. However, while the end of things seemed inevitable, it did not come. Instead, humanity faced what was referred to as the age of sunrise.
The earth somehow began to recover from its ecological damage, and humanity began to slowly rebuild. Again, we don't know a whole lot about how humans lived during this time. It does seem again that most of the great cities and constructions were from before the collapse, at least the bones of them.
However, it does appear like humanity was able to achieve some level of technological sophistication. The best proof of this is honestly the presence of espironza. And again, I do believe this explains some of the weird technological disparity you see on the surface.
Computers, for example, look far more basic than a level of technological sophistication implied by, say, the vehicles or structures. And I notice when your radar is underground, you can see, for example, on the journey into Espironza, those same computers are present underground. So it seems like after the collapse, humanity moved back to the surface, they rediscovered and rebuilt technology when possible, but especially in certain areas never achieved the same level of sophistication.
Hence the at times inacronistic technology. Still, the structures, the cities, the major installations like dams, those are almost certainly pre-olapse. The description for the buried city, for example, lists it as evidence of how humanity lived before the collapse.
And well, the codeex entry for the hydrophonic domes state that they are newer constructions. Humanity after the collapse was presumably responsible for many of the tunnels and elevators and other means of operating through the surface. And the game even alludes to new passageways being opened up.
Although we also do know that many of these tunnels known as tubes were originally created to help the evacuation of the planet during the collapse. Okay, so we have an environmental collapse. Humans on the surface live in darkness.
They barely survive. They begin rebuilding the civilization. What happens next?
Well, shortly after sunrise, we get the arrival of the first wave of arcs. The source of these is unknown, though there are some good theories. But this attack was devastating.
The first wave of arcs are less technologically advanced than the ones we fight throughout the game, and we can see evidence of them across the map. The first wave culminated in the Battle of Victory Ridge, where raiders assembled to fight off the remaining Ark forces, giving survivors temporary relief prior to the arrival of the second wave. The battle itself was quite devastating, and the land near it is still suffering the ecological effects.
Now, this is where things continue to get a little confusing because there's an indeterminate amount of time between the final battle of the first wave of Arch Attacks and the beginning of now the second wave. However, we can speculate given the advancement in technology of Ark machines and a new generation of raiders fighting the battle. It seems like there were a good 20 to 30 years between waves 1 and two.
This can also be surmised through one of the first NPCs you meet in the game, Celeste. Celeste seems to be in her late 20s or early 30s and is a survivor of the first wave, losing her home and parents to architects at an early age before adopting a nomadic lifestyle prior to the second wave. We don't know how much time humanity had on the surface before the attacks.
How much of their advancement has come subsequently, but arcs of the second wave were more unrelenting than the first, making the surface of Earth more inhospitable than it already was. Humanity at this point was again forced fully underground, occupying sunken cities and utilizing that affforementioned underground network of tubes. Celeste and a small group of others helped establish Toledo and the neighborhood of Spironza beneath the former Italian countryside in an attempt to survive overwhelming Ark forces.
This brings us to where your player story begins as they're welcomed into a struggling and now very resource poor underground city taking up the role of a topside raider. That's the basic story as it's currently known. There's a lot of intrigue and possibilities for how things can continue, but let's get into theorizing.
And there's a lot here. Most obviously, we have the origins of the arcs. There's a few ideas.
Let's get one of the more interesting out of the way. Could the arcs have existed as a part of pre-colapse earth and caused the collapse in order to begin a machine takeover like Skynet of the Terminator franchise? Post collapse.
human technology as we see in weapons and the underground city is very slapped together utilizing tech from humanity's past and what they can achieve now. One of the most advanced remnants of pre-colapse society is the humanoid android. On Spironzo we have Lance, who like human residents is unaware of his origins, but the spaceport map makes it clear that other models most likely existed prior to the collapse.
Lance is very different from the others. You can find many destroyed or damaged models incapable of speech near the spaceport, implying they were left behind. It could be that AI became self-aware and following years of mistreatment by their creators decided to rebel.
The androids being an early stage of evolution for what the arcs would later become. Or maybe the arcs are simply a tool of some other super intelligence. You can sort of think of the attack on the environment as sort of an inverse of the machine uprising in the Matrix.
In that story, humanity darkened the skies in an attempt to block off the energy source of the machine empire. In this case, the Arcs may have targeted the ecosystem intentionally, not just to destroy humanity, but maybe even to create a biome which suited them more appropriately. But if their goal simply was to destroy humanity, that would explain why the Earth seemingly miraculously recovered after some time.
Another, I think, less interesting and likely example is that the arcs are extraterrestrial. same story. They orchestrated the ecological collapse to eliminate a majority of humanity before starting two full-scale invasions.
This one doesn't really speak to me. There's something very human about the arcs, especially when compared with other technology which still exists. And that's why I think the most likely theory is the final one we're going to discuss now.
That arcs are being sent by the colony of humans who initially left the planet, the Exodus humans. This theory is a bit more involved, but I think you can find more evidence to support it. For one, those who abandoned the planet were most likely Earth's elite.
The wealthy and powerful alongside perhaps scientists and the world's greatest thinkers. Space travel and colonization of other planets was probably not a commonality prior to collapse with the CEX even referring to those who abandoned the destruction as valerous survivors. Thematically, there's a lot more you can do here.
It makes the central conflict of the game a battle between classes. the wealthy utilizing arcs to steal resources and essentially the planet from the struggling people they left behind. It blends seamlessly with the current themes of the game as well.
The city of Toledo is filled with secluded neighborhoods of poor and struggling people driven to selfishness given the dwindling resources of most and overabundance of some. The neighborhoods all look out for themselves but collaborate when the need exists almost like how the players do. You can see a stranger on the surface and take what's theirs or attempt to come together to fight a greater threat.
Meanwhile, the wealthy humans live among the stars, kicking back, watching us fight and getting ready to take back a newly pristine planet. I'll come back to that in just a second because there's also some, I guess I'll call it neutral information I noticed within the game. For one, and actually I think this does hint a bit more at humans being responsible for the ark threat.
The arcs are said to currently be residing in orbit. We see pods dropping from space. They usually crash, but they are meant to be testing something before returning to orbit.
something in the planet. The arcs generally seem really interested in digging. It could be that the Exodus humans are simply testing the healthiness of Earth before returning.
Or on the other hand, if the rogue AI theory is correct, maybe there's some metal or something they're looking for which they believe can further their own technology. All right, though, back to the themes of the big guy versus the little guy. We do need to talk about how Ark Raiders may tie into developer Imbark Studios previous game, The Finals.
The Finals is set in 2,100 within a virtual reality competition show consisting of gladiator matches with a world similar to Ready Player 1. Most of humanity spends much of their time in VR with very little known of the world outside the game show. The final shares these themes of class with many large corporations running and profiting off of the finals saterizing corporate sponsorships alongside an ongoing plot of activists known as CNS who attempt to expose those behind the games.
I think it's plausible that the finals and Ark Raiders exist within the same fictional universe, but there's also a little bit of messiness here. At the beginning of the video, I said Ark Raiders is set in 2180. That is what the opening cinematic implies.
However, the website itself says that in 2180, Earth fell. So, by that, there's still 100 years between the events of the finals and the collapse during Arc Raiders. So, anything could have happened.
Another connection can be found on the Spaceport map featuring a sponsor featured in the finals with the Italian word for liar spray painted over it. This seems like a CNS message and does hint that the two games could exist in the same universe. It could also just be a fun Easter egg left by the devs.
This however is only the beginning and speculation will continue as the story develops further. Arc Raiders is very very popular right out the gate and seeing how Embark has proven themselves in handling an ongoing online game with the finals, it seems like Arc Raiders has only the potential to grow from here. But those are the basics and also some of my thoughts and theories.
Let me know what you think down below and I'll see you next time. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat.
Heat. [music] [music] [music] Heat. [music] Heat.
[singing] Heat.
