The Story Behind ARC Raiders’ Setting and Lore

If you've jumped into ARC Raiders, you might have felt a few familiar vibes. The game is like a cool mix of a Fallout style retrofuturistic post-apocalyptic world and the feeling you get in Horizon Zero Dawn where you're a scavenger who travels the quiet ruins of a society that was much greater than your own.

Officially, ARC Raiders is a multiplayer extraction adventure game. It's set in a lethal future earth that has been ravaged by a mysterious robots known as ARC. You play as a Raider, one of the human survivors who lives in an underground city. Your job is to venture Topside to the dangerous surface to scavenge for valuable loot and resources. You should do all that while fighting off the ARC and other rival Raiders.

But beyond that get in, get loot, get out gameplay loop, there is some really interesting lore and world building that hides just beneath the surface. Though in this case I should literally say underground. Let's dig into the story of this broken world and find out what exactly is going on.

Where Does ARC Raiders Take Place?

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic future. The question is where on earth are we? Based on the environment and ruins, the surface world you explore is almost certainly modern day Italy.

Of course, humanity doesn't live on the surface anymore. The ARCs rule the Topside. Humans have been forced to create a new home below the surface. The main underground city is called Toledo. Players live in an underground neighborhood or portion of this city called Speranza.

Speranza is your home base. It's where you return after a dangerous run. You upgrade your gear in your workshop and craft new items. Traders are there to give you quests too.

When you leave Speranza to go Topside, there's a region known as the Rust Belt. This zone is divided into several different locations that have their own vibe.

• Dam Battlegrounds: This area is a mix of forests, swamps, old research centers.
• Buried City: This is a pre-Collapse city that is now almost completely covered in sand dunes. You can explore what's left of hospitals, malls, old apartment buildings, etc. The game's own lore describes it as evidence of how humanity lived before the Collapse.
• Spaceport: A derelict launch facility that's full of old forgotten technology from the pre-Collapse world.
• Blue Gate: A location set higher up in the mountains that feature more open areas as well as tunnels and underground complexes.

What Was the Collapse?

How did the world get this way? The game is a bit vague on the exact timeline, but the central event that changed everything is known as the Collapse.

The game is set in 2180. But the Collapse happened long time before that. It wasn't a quick single event. It was a devastating planet-wide climate change disaster. The earth we knew was ravaged by massive earthquakes and uncontrollable wildfires. Catastrophic flooding happened and the air became polluted. The planet was left desolate and nearly uninhabitable.

This apocalypse split the human race into two groups. First, there were those who escaped to space on incredibly advanced rockets. These were likely the earth's elite. The wealthy and powerful minority. The game's lore even refers to them as valorous survivors.

And then there was everyone else. The second group was simply left behind to survive on what was at that point a dying planet.

The ARCs and the Second Fall

For the humans left on earth life was grim. They were surviving in the harshest conditions possible with no real hope for society's return. But then something amazing happened. The end of the world didn't come.

This period became known as the Age of Sunrise. For unknown reasons, the earth somehow began to recover from its ecological damage. With the planet slowly healing, humanity began to slowly rebuild its civilization.

This recovery period explains the strange anachronistic technology you find in the game. All the massive structures the dam, the big structures, the spaceport are almost certainly from before the Collapse. But the computers and other tech you find look far more basic. This is because it's tech that humanity managed to rediscover or rebuild after the fall. They never quite reached the same level of sophistication they had before.

Humanity was rebuilding. But just as things were starting to look up, the ARCs arrived.

The First Wave of these mysterious robots was devastating. These early models were less technologically advanced than the ones you fight in the game. You can still see evidence of them scattered across the map. This first war eventually culminated in the Battle of Victory Ridge. That was where Raiders assembled to fight off the remaining machines which gave humanity a temporary relief.

It seems like there was a good 20 to 30 years of peace between the first and second waves. But the next wave was different. The Second Wave of ARCs was far more advanced and more unrelenting than the first one.

This new overwhelming force of machines made the surface of earth more inhospitable than it already was. This is what finally forced humanity to abandon the surface for good and retreat fully underground. Into the sunken cities and tube networks. They established places like Toledo and Speranza to survive which is right where your story as a Raider begins.

Where Did the ARCs Come From?

This is the central question of ARC Raiders. The game doesn't give you a straight answer, but the lore provides some fascinating theories.

One idea is that the ARCs are a Terminator style rogue AI. Perhaps they were created before the Collapse. They became self-aware and caused the environmental disaster to begin this takeover.

Another less interesting theory is that they are simply extraterrestrial. An alien force that orchestrated the Collapse to wipe out humanity before launching their invasions. This one doesn't feel quite right. As the lore notes, there is something very human about the ARCs.

That leads to the third and most compelling theory. The ARCs are being sent by the Exodus humans.

This theory suggests that the descendants of the wealthy elite who abandoned earth are now sending these robots back. Why? To take the planet back for themselves. This theory blends seamlessly with the game's themes. It makes the central conflict a battle between classes. The wealthy who are living comfortably among the stars. They are using the ARCs to steal resources and the planet itself from the struggling descendants of the people they left behind.

Source: Daze Puzzle Games Hub