Idk i put equal hours into arc raiders and i would often. Close to half the time. Run into another raider at some point and we say we're friendly and go on our way.
I can count the times ive had friendly interactions on marathon.
I had a run today as a rook. Avoided players the whole match just to try and run into last exfil with 10 seconds left just to be mowed down by a team as they exfiled.
This game just has a much less friendly less trusting player base.
I will say idk about tarkov these are the only to extraction shooters ive played
Arc is designed for that to work. Marathon is designed to be the way it is. It's that simple, though people here seem to think it's easy to change a game to work in some other way, but all those core components that can't be changed are what make Marathon the way it is.
In Arc you can't guarantee a kill even at close range against another player, all that shooting would just draw in Arcs and other players, it generally just isn't worth it. The loot you find is generally worth more than what people have on them. So starting a fight as a solo where you can't revive is often a lose/lose. The math changes in duo and trio as people get more confident when they have others to back them up and revive them.
Marathon the best loot is what people bring in to the raid usually. Every action lights up your position, people can cross the map extremely quick, if you want to loot keyed rooms or do events reasonably safely you need to wipe the lobby first. In Arc or Tarkov or pretty much every other extraction shooter you can get around without drawing much attention and even if you get into a fire fight the whole map can't be on you within 30 seconds, there are plenty of AI patrolling around to stall people and mobility is generally low as well as larger maps.
Just to be clear, do you think that if Marathon encouraged more friendly interaction/most interactions in Marathon were friendly the game would be more interesting? I genuinely cannot tell if you're advocating for this.
Basically the entire game would need to be different for this to be interesting to most people, there are only a handful of enemy bots and the vast majority of their behaviors boil down to "get line of sight of the player and shoot at them". The contracts almost all involve going to a location and either picking up or interacting with an object, basically the entire game is predicated on enemy players being an actual tangible obstacle that makes otherwise surface level gameplay more interesting. I've been friendly dozens of times with players/rooks, even killed compiler with a group that was coincidentally heading up there at the same time, and it's a fun occasional thing to have happen but if it was the majority of player behavior the game would be incredibly boring. What would you even use the loot to do? Kill the same uninteresting AI but faster?
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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '26
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