My love for Arc Raiders is starting to wane, and that plays right into Marathon's hands

Since it dropped at the tail end of October, Arc Raiders has shrugged off any potential threats to its firm grip on my gaming time. New seasons of Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6 have led to brief dabbles with both games, but little more than that. Destiny 2’s Star Wars-themed Renegades expansion is still sitting in my library, waiting to be played. Even the addictive nature of cursed slot machine sim Cloverpit couldn’t keep me away from Embark’s extraction shooter for long. However, over the last week or so, I’ve started to show signs of Arc Raiders fatigue, which bodes extremely well for an FPS game that, just a few months ago, I thought was doomed: Marathon.

I’ve rambled many times here at PCGamesN about what makes Arc Raiders so great – the emergent moments; the ability to be either a wholesome, friendly experience or an immersive, challenging one; the map designs; the accessibility of its free loadout system to get you back on your feet or minimize the risk to your gear. It’s one of the best multiplayer games of recent years, and it’s made the extraction genre more palatable than ever.

However, this week, I jumped in for my regular dose of Arc Raiders and felt its grip loosening. I’m by no means an eight-hours-a-day grinder who’s blasted through the latest Expedition Project, nor am I an aggressive, PvP-minded player who’s constantly engaging in shootouts with others. Despite it being my most-played game of recent times, I’m still a steady Eddie when compared to some of the game’s top raiders. Basically, I’m in the middleground – any arguments of ‘you’ve completed everything’ or ‘you don’t play enough’ don’t really apply to me.

So why am I starting to feel my first pangs of Arc Raiders fatigue? Embark’s done a decent job of keeping players occupied with new projects, limited-time events, and a few new map conditions, but I think it boils down to the lack of content that adds permanent, meaningful depth to the overall experience.

Sure, there have been a couple of new augments, the solo versus squads matchmaking option, and a few new seasonal items thrown into the loot pool. However, aside from what arrived in the couple of weeks immediately after launch with the debut of Stella Montis, there’ve been no new weapons, no new maps, no new enemy types, no new NPC traders. For a game that’s not even six months old yet, it’d of course be unreasonable to expect all of the above, but even one new addition in any of those categories post-Stella Montis would’ve helped.

Very soon, though, that will start to change. Alongside another map condition, Raider Deck, and Project, next week’s Shrouded Sky update brings our first new Arc enemy since Stella Montis arrived. One of the maps is also getting an update, which should mean new or reworked locations to explore. That sounds mightily promising, but it’ll also only have a couple of days to make an impression before the free Marathon Server Slam begins on Thursday, February 26.

If you asked me around the time of Arc Raiders’ launch whether Marathon would come out on top in this extraction shooter duel, I’d have said ‘no way.’ However, Bungie has managed to flip the script and change perceptions (mine included) with some more polished, exciting glimpses at what this stylish sci-fi rival can offer that Arc Raiders can’t – tight, Destiny-esque FPS gunplay, a sandbox of character-based abilities and lootable mods that create a layer of loadout building that Arc Raiders lacks, and high-quality voice acting from a star-studded cast.

If Marathon manages to hook me, and Shrouded Sky’s content doesn’t fill me with excitement, I can genuinely see a world where my extraction obsession jumps from Embark’s game to Bungie’s. Do I think Marathon will drum up the same kind of mainstream love and overall player counts that Arc Raiders has? No. But as a huge shooter fan (one with a lot of hours in Destiny too) I could quite easily fall off the wagon and find myself in a major Marathon hole.