The Ringer-Verse - The Online Shooters Shoot-Out: ‘Battlefield’ vs. ‘Call of Duty’ vs. ‘ARC Raiders’ | Button Mash

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Ben is joined by Kotaku’s Claire Jackson and Zack Zwiezen as they react to the just-announced nominations for the Game Awards (focusing on the Game of the Year candidates, the record number of nominations for ‘Clair Obscur,’ and the debate about the definition of “indie”) and then break down the industry implications, player considerations, and AI ramifications of the competition brewing among a trio of online-multiplayer powerhouse shooters: ‘Battlefield 6,’ ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 7,’ and ‘ARC Raiders.’ Intro (0:00) The Game Awards nominations (3:23) The first-person shooter showdown (22:10) Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Claire Jackson and Zack Zwiezen Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. to The Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, Senior Editor for the Ringer and Ringaverse Raider on the battlefield of Buttonmash. As promised, we are answering the podcast Call of Duty today to bring you our online shooters shootout, in which we'll discuss the competition playing out on PCs and consoles among a trio of recently released online multiplayer powerhouses, Call of Duty Blackop 7, Battlefield 6, and Arc Raiders.

like the campaign in Black Op 7, this episode as designed as a co-op experience. Although unlike Call of Duty co-op, the podcast can be paused and played offline. With me today is, I think, roughly a third of Kotaku's full-time staff. Two Kotaku colleagues whose coverage of these games specifically and gaming in general, I have long enjoyed Kotaku Associate Editor for Tips and Guides, Claire Jackson. Welcome, Claire. Hey, thanks for having me. Not the last time I'll be saying Claire on this episode.

So unlike some Clare's, you, to my knowledge, were not nominated for Game of the Year. You weren't eligible to be fair. Yeah. You're not obscure enough. I certainly try. Yeah, it's true. I'm calling you out of obscurity to appear on this podcast. Also here is Kotaku's staff writer, Star Wars correspondent, and GTA devotee Zach's Wisen.

Hello, Zach. Hello. I think we're like half the staff, actually, by the way. Really? I think that might be right, yeah. Well, sorry to leave Kotaku so short-handed. I hope no enormous news breaks while we are reporting this episode. Half-Life 3 gets announced why we're doing this. Oh, my God. You know what? That would be exciting. A live reaction to Half-Life 3 on button mesh.

Absolutely. That'd be great. No, not until the steam machines come out next year. That's when we're getting Half-Life 3. We all agree. Zach, actually, if I remember right, you were the first to report that GTA6 might miss its fall 2025 window. And you know what? I can confirm that report today. How are you feeling about fall 2026? Fall 2026. Oh, no, it won't get delayed again.

There's no way. No, I don't know. I think, you know, I don't have any insider info or anything exciting to report this time or whatever. But all I could say is that. like, this is a big game and they're hard to make. And so, like, I, it could. It very, like, I hope people understand it very well could slip to 2027. Like, who knows?

That's pure speculation. Pure speculation. Not citing hashtag sources at least. No, no. Not now, but we will stay tuned. Lovely to have you both here. And I think we have our fingers on the pulse on the pod today because I just went to SteamDB, the website where you can look up information on how many people are.

playing games on Steam. And when I clicked on the search box, the popular today display that popped up listed at the top in order, arc Raiders, Call of Duty, and Battlefield 6. So timely, so topical. But before we get to those three games, let's talk about some other games that everyone's been buzzing about. The nominees and non-nominees for the game awards, the annual ceremony slated for December 11th. Or maybe we could call them the Clare Obscure Awards, because Expedition 33 is nominated a record 12 times, most notably for Game of the Year, a category in which its company consists of Death Stranding 2, Donkey Kong Bonanza, Hades 2, Hollow Night Soak Song, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

And as usual, the unveiling of the nominees, which happened on Monday, touched off a round of discussion and debate about the biggest snubs and what an indie game is anyway. and I tend not to dwell too much on award shows, especially award shows that are mostly showcases for upcoming games with some awards on the side. But still, we must feed the beast and create some content here. So what was your reaction, if any, Claire, were you pleased to see your namesake so nominated? Spell the name wrong, though. They did spell the name wrong. They left the EOF.

Claire, yes. I think, you know, Claire obscure, I think, feels very appropriate for a nomination. It's a fantastic game and of a scope that, at least, you know, for me and I guess my demographic of late 30s gamers, like, we haven't seen an RPG quite like this. Like, it straight up takes me back to Final Fantasy 7 or Final Fantasy 8 and those kind of like glory days of the late 90s. And we kind of thought that those sorts of RPGs might have been a thing of the past, but clearly not. Clairely not. Yeah. I think

can I leave a podcast? Can I leave a podcast based on a single pun? I mean, I think Claire and I could take it from here probably. Yeah. Just to finish that off, I think holiday is also really well deserved. I mean, that's been a game, I think, that I have seen just in my social circle, like people just magnetically attached to and like, yes, it's hard and yes, it's punishing. But like, you know, the other day a friend of mine told me like he finally finished the game.

And it was like, it was a moment. It was just like, oh, wow, like, you got through it. That's incredible. I have not yet had that moment. Maybe someday, yeah. And so, you know, I think there's, you know, it's always appropriate to have a discourse about the difficulty and what people were expecting with this game. But it's clearly left an impact on a lot of people.

So those two games, I think, are very well deserved to be nominees. The other ones, I wouldn't say that they're undeserving, but I, speaking for myself, I don't know that I have much of a take on those ones. Yeah. Zach, are you angry about anything aside from my bad pun? No, no, I think like when I saw the game of the years, nominees kind of leaked before the official announcement, there was not, I was a surprise.

Like, everything here is kind of what I was expecting. I think I agree with the points that, like Claire had made. I would say also that it is interesting to note that none of the games come from these games all come from studios that haven't had layoffs, which I think is always a nice thing to kind of point out. Maybe that's an interesting, important thing. I don't know. Personally, for me, Death Strategy 2, if I had to pick from this,

it's probably my game in the year if I have to pick from this list. I think Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is like a really cool thing to include here because that's not the kind of game that usually gets elevated in these kinds of shows. I know it's on consoles, but it's a very PC kind of focused, super nitty-gritty survival RPG with like all the details that come with that and the realism. I think the only weird except is my only, the only one if I had to cut one would be Bonanza, and I like Bonanza a lot.

How dare you. But I love Bonanza. It's a great game. But it just, I don't know if it stacks up with the rest of these nominees. But that's my only quibble. Yeah, you know, Nintendo tends. not to get nominated all that often, which is maybe because the expectations are always so high for a Nintendo first party platformer. And Bonanza, I think, exceeded expectations because it's not a Mario game, even though it's made by the Mario Odyssey team or part of it.

And because it brought that level of polish, I think it exceeded my own expectations for it. And maybe also the people who are nominating games for these awards. And maybe that's why it ends up here. I have no problem with any of these games being nominated. I think they're all deserving. It's unfortunate that more games can't be nominated. And that's kind of a longstanding quibble and complaint. And given how Jeff Keely emulates the Oscars, let's say, which expanded to 10 Best Picture

nominees every year as of 2022, I'm surprised the Game Awards hasn't adopted that and followed suit because there are more games than movies. If anything, we need more nominees. right? I feel like Jeff Keely my gut tells me that he doesn't want to dilute the game of the year

like he cares a lot about the like prestige around this show even if you disagree we disagree about if the show deserves the prestige it has and all that but I think he cares a lot about it and I think adding 10 games would just

dilute it it would dilute it a bit to him and I think that's also why he throws in like the fan category. It's like, here you go. Here's one for you. You guys can go social engineer your favorite game into winning. And there are a lot of categories as well that kind of spreads out. Because like Game of the Year is what everyone's talking about.

But like Arc Raiders got nominated in a different category and other games that didn't quite make the game of the year list picked up some nom. Yeah, that's the headliner. I mean, I'd like for there to be room for split fiction and blueprints and dispatch and ghost of Yote and well, whatever else really. graders, for that matter, not that the Game Awards generally gives live service games a goody nod. You know, the game awards. Overwatch, one.

True. Yeah, they tend to have a type where it's more single player oriented, narratively focused, certain types of production values, right? It skews that way. And really, even 10 is not enough to recognize everything. Inevitably, you're going to leave something out. And I'm almost sad that the Game Awards has sort of ascended to. become, as its title suggests, the game awards? Because for a while there, we had many game awards.

And we still do, of course. And there are some that are maybe more prestigious when it comes to actual developers, you know, the BAFTAs or the Dice Awards, right? But they don't get the attention. They don't get the publicity. They don't get the headlines and the sponsorship because the game awards, most people are tuning in. Let's be serious to see what will be announced and what new trailers will drop and the awards, you know, that's sort of a bonus. That's a perk that's thrown in there. But I do think, while I don't like the game awards, to be very clear, I think it's a, I think it is a way too long. The show's way too long. It's stuff of way too many commercials and ads. I think Jeff Keely should not be the face of the games industry. And I think he's bad at what he

does a lot of the time. But all that said, it is the most popular video game award show by a margin that's hard to measure. And so I think I see some people who go like, who cares? But we should care because like this show can literally change tastes. It can literally set people down different paths of what they're going to play. It can dictate where money goes. It can dictate where eyeballs go. So as much as I would love to be like, go to hell, Jeff Keely. I've never going to watch your show again. It's my job. I have to. to. But even though it's not my job, this is an important show, and that sucks, but I think we should continue to put pressure on the game awards to be better, to do better, to try to be better

about the games they're nominating, the processes, the transparency, et cetera, because this show is, unfortunately, one of the biggest things every year in the game industry. I have friends who barely read anything about games. They buy like two games a year. They watch this show every year live. Right. Yeah, it's filled that black hole that like the absence of E3 has left behind, right? That too. And maybe that and all the other Jeff Keeley hosted shows during the summer.

Obviously the only other thing would be Summer Games Fest, I guess, which is also the Keeley project. Right. So like it is, it is kind of nice and you know, mostly agree with Zach's take and sentiment toward the game awards, but there have been, you know, a few years now where I've actually kind of like

enjoyed watching it. Um, that's just a celebration of this medium and imperfect one for sure and one that we could use a lot more transparency and more faces, no doubt. But like, sometimes you get some, you know, great award speeches and other things. There are some genuine moments there that are worth tuning in for. That Alan Wake 2 dance alone. Oh, my God, yes. Yeah.

And when they do their lifetime achievement type of awards where they give it out to developers of people who have been doing this a long time. There are moments of greatness in this show. And then it's just sandwich between, you know, all of the headache-inducing ads and trailers. Yeah, and yeah, it does sort of expose the, you know, the art versus commerce push and pull, right? It's just, it's kind of crass in a way,

to a degree even greater than award shows in other media, I think, where there's at least more of a, you know, we're pretending at least that we're, this is a retrospective ceremony that we are honoring awards, that we're honoring things that already came out as opposed to hyping you up for things that have yet to come out. That's like a great point is that like a lot of award shows in other mediums, at least like you say,

pretend to have this air of like, oh, we are about the art. Whereas the game awards would be like, here's the, here's McDonald's Master 16 to tell you about the next Call of Duty update. And it's like, oh,

you guys, this is not. And the fact that they speed run awards throughout the show where they'll just, they'll just knock out six of them. Oh, yeah. You've got 30 seconds if you're lucky to speak. Or yes, we will just,

you know, between trailers, we will mention something that won. People are up sometimes for awards. They're like, this game won, this game one, this game won, all right. Yeah. But what you're saying that it does break through, that there is kind of a bright spotlight here and a power of the pulpit.

I think that's why people get so worked up about indie definitions, especially that category because you could be shining a light on some lesser-known underappreciated games, but it tends to be only certain types of indies. right? And of course, there's a round of discussion about whether Clare Obscure should even be called indie and technically what that even means. And, you know, my feeling is baby steps, I'd say, because an indie game by any definition has never won game of the year at the Game Awards. There's just, there's never even been a year when more than one was nominated for that award. And we have three this year. And yes, they are either sequels to huge hits, Hades 2, Silk Song, or in the case of Clare Obscure, kind of a double a game with a sizable budget and team. So they don't fit the indie game, the movie image of the solo developer, you know, in their basement, just working away in secrecy and silence for several years and then releasing this solo project. It's not quite that kind of indie game. But they are indie games by at least some definition.

And maybe they need to sort of break the seal, you know, to kind of get recognition before other games can get in the mix. I feel like the moment we reached a point where there were indie publishers, this term lost every single shred of meaning to me. By the very definition, having a publisher that isn't yourself means you are no longer an independent game. In my, like, that's, indie to me has always been, it was something that kind of like became popular in the Xbox 360 era and stuff, this idea of like you could just make a game yourself and you could put it out

on these platforms like Steam that were finally letting you do that. And now that we have indie publishers and indie publishing networks and all this stuff, it's just to me, I think we need to just go to a different way to measure the stuff, which would be like budget. I think budget is a better way to measure this than it is just to have these vibes of like, it's indie. What does that mean? But of course, budget is not always public or transparent. So it's tough to classify. Right. Yeah.

And to your point, Ben, like, yeah, like once, and as you're saying, like, once we have these like publishers, like no longer. is that term signifying like the loan developer, you know, working on their passion project in the basement. So, you know, that term means something totally different now. So, yeah, we are overdue for a redefinition. Yeah. And also the Game Awards does this little sneaky thing where they technically have two indie categories. They have the Indy Game Award and then they have Games for Impact, which is where they're like, okay, the not exciting stuff. We'll put it there.

Or the stuff that's not hot with the kids or whatever, you can kind of hide it over there and we'll throw somebody a bone there. Because that's where stuff like Consume Me is at. That's where stuff like South of Midnight is. And those are really good games. And they kind of get stuck into this other weird category. Yeah. And, you know, I don't love that there's a clear obscure backlash because it's not indie enough

or because it's getting so much love that people feel the need to push back. a bit. I do understand the impulse to pump the brakes and say, let's give some other games some shine. But it is a great game in its own right that I certainly wouldn't be sorry to see anointed. And the fact that it might hog all the awards is

sort of a shame. But then, you know, I think it deserves to win some awards. Right, exactly. Yeah. I'm on your side on this. Like, the huge amount of backlash to this game over, like, we can have a discussion of what's indie, what's not indie, that's fine. But the way some people are like, this thing shouldn't even

be nominated, it's not fair. Like, it's a really good game. Like, if this game had been published by Activision, it wouldn't matter. If it was the exact same game, it would still be winning awards. But I don't think this game would have been published by an Activision, right? It's like, you know, like, one of my first, like, impulse thoughts when I was playing Claire Obscure was like, oh my God, this is what I've wanted Final Fantasy to be for years. And, you know, like, I'll defend a lot of recent Final Fantasy's, but like, look at Final Fantasy

7 rebirth compared to Claire Obscure, right? And like, Rebirth inherits this legacy of the kind of game that Claire Obscure arguably is, right? And you're not going to get that without some kind of an indie spirit, given the climate of the industry, I would argue. So the term is not entirely misused. Oh, no, it's not. I would argue also for Claire Obscure, like, it's a small team on a limited budget with freedom that is not afforded to a AAA studio. Like, they fit indie in almost every way, except for the weird, hang that they have a publisher,

which is, but like, at this point, every indie game that you love has a publisher. So I don't think that even matters anymore. But yeah, I think it's strange to try to signal it out as like, well, this isn't indie enough. It kind of feels more like people's definition of indie is like, well, it needs to be a 2D pixel.

It needs to be this very specific type of thing that I consider indie. Right, which was a throwback to a previous era. Yes, yes. Developers were kind of free enough to like go and zero You're right, because they've been told by all these publishers for years that nobody wants 2D games, nobody wants this stuff like in those early 2000s as we were coming out of that.

And so there were these developments who went, well, go to hell, I'm going to make it anyways. And that became kind of the image of an indie game. But I think as we've seen people, as time has moved forward, what people consider retro has changed, boomer shooters, old 90s, old 90s, JRPs. And that's now where solo small teams are going. Yeah, that window was shifted for sure. And it's funny to see the waves of discourse cresting. over a period of several months where Claire Obscure comes out and, oh, is this the savior of the industry?

Right. This is a break from the AAA onslaught and its original and its developers who were kind of cast out of Ubisoft or had to take their talents elsewhere to really indulge their creativity. And they come up with this great game and everyone's celebrating it. But then everyone celebrated it so much that now we're sort of sick of hearing about how great Claire Obscure is and we've got to take it down a notch. So look, it's a great game, and we can appreciate it on that level, I think. And I would implore people not to get too consumed by the awards because, yeah, as Zach said, they are important, in a sense, for signaling what the industry values and bringing attention to games. But they don't have to reflect your personal tastes, and you don't have to let them sway the greatest games that you played this year. These are just other people's opinions, and we can take them for what they're worth.

and people have plenty of opinions, as do we, clearly, on Buttonmash. And next month, we'll have more talk about the Game Awards. We'll discuss how many awards Claire Obscure wins, and we'll find out whether it takes home the hardware in the hotly anticipated button mash ringerverse awards. But let me lay out what our listeners can look forward to on our feeds for the rest of this month. The Midnight Boys, PooPew, we'll cover Wicked for Good on Friday. And next week, ButtonMash will be back to Speed Run this year's surprise Steam set. which we have missed along the way, like peak and Megabunk and Schedule 1, et cetera,

followed by Ringiverse Recommends for November. Submit your nominations now to Ringiverse Recommends at gmail.com. And on Wednesday, while you're sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, what better way to celebrate than by listening to the Midnight Boys' White Women Movie Draft. I know nothing more than that. And I'm not sure I want to, but that's what it says on the schedule. And so I have told you to anticipate it. Didn't Disney cut that out of the Pirates of the Caribbean?

Wait, hold on a minute. Seems like a draft Joe Me would dominate. After Thanksgiving, Mint Edition, we'll talk Zootopia 2 and Disney sequels. And over the next week on House of Our, Mal and Joe will also discuss Wicked, rank the best fights of the century so far, and get into Stranger Things, Season 5, Volume 1, Part 1. And, of course, you can contact button mesh at ringoverst gaming at gmail.com. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business.

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Sweetgreen.com. This episode is brought to by the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo. That's a mouthful, but that's because it packs a lot in. Earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases with it, big or small. So whether it's buying tickets to the game and grabbing a coffee, it earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me, the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo, be a 2%er. Learn more at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash terms of play. Okay. Let's get to our main event for today. A first person shooter showdown involving a 23-year-old franchise, a 22-year-old franchise, and a roughly 20-day-old franchise.

Which is a third-person shooter? Yeah. Good point. Yes. Shooter. Let's not specify which person. On October 10th, Battlefield 6, developed by Battlefield Studios and published by a newly acquired for $55 billion.

Electronic Arts came out for Windows, PS5, and Xbox series, a free-to-play battle royale mode called RedSec followed two weeks later. This is the franchise's follow-up to 2021's, shall we say, divisive battlefield 2042. Then October 30th brought the debut on the same systems of a new challenger, Arc Raiders, developed and published by Embark Studios, makers of another online shooter, the finals. And last week, the latest Call of Duty, Blackop 7, which, believe it or not, is the sequel to last year's Blackop 6, developed by Trey Ark and Ravensau. where and published by Activision came out on PC,

PS5, Xbox series, plus PS4 and Xbox 1 for greater last-gen inclusion. Now, these games are going head to head in the sense that they're all online multiplayer shooters and they're competing for some of the same players' time. But, of course, they scratch different itches and belong to different subgenres. So, Zach, for folks who aren't super plugged into the live service world

and tend to group these games together. Can you first explain how Battlefield and Call of Duty, which you have reviewed, the franchises as a whole and their latest incarnations differ from each other? And then after that, Claire, maybe you can explain how Arc Raiders differs from both of them. Yes. Yeah, I think it's very easy to look at these two things to be like, oh, they're the exact same thing and move on. Yeah. And people do that all the time with JRPGs.

People do that all the time with every kind of genre like this. but if you actually dig into it, they're very different, which is funny because they worked. For a while, when they both started, they were just World War II shooters, and the big difference was Collierty had a campaign. Battlefield had big maps. It was slower.

And over time, that has mostly stayed true. Battlefield has gained a campaign. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does it. It can vary. And lost the big maps, maybe. And kind of lost the big maps, maybe. But the big difference in my mind has always been,

Call of Duty is a game where your teammates are kind of irrelevant. It's more about how you, are shooting and doing and they're there, and that's nice. Whereas Battlefield is a game where your teammates are extremely important, and if your teammates suck, which they tend to always do for me, then you're going to lose your match or you're going to have a struggle. It is really a game. It's really a difference between an arena shooter and a kind of a military simulator,

a light military simulator. That's how I would kind of describe those two. And this year are just that good. Whoa, whoa, this needs to be cut from the pot. I can't, I can't. No, I think it really can't matter a lot, and that is kind of the big difference, right? If you get stuck with a team of 10 snipers and they're not pushing the point, not that I have that problem, you'll probably get to lose. Whereas with Call of Duty, I've had horrible teammates, but in most modes, it doesn't really matter if you can squeeze, you can still squeeze a victory out.

But this year in particular, they are very different. maybe the most different they've ever been because Battlefield 6's whole approach this year was, oh boy, people didn't like that last one. It's time to go back to Battlefield 3. And let's make a new Battlefield 3, a very grounded, realistic shooter

focused on Back to Basics approach to Battlefield. And call it duty, feels like there was a gas leak at Triarch and what shipped Activision didn't get the game early. And so they had to just ship whatever got sent to them. And they went, I guess this is what we're shipping.

So they are very different this year. But not quite as different, probably as Arc Raiders is from either of them. And Claire, maybe you can explain the basics of extraction shooters because this is a genre that dates back at least to Tom Clancy's The Division or maybe escape from Tarkov, which is a game that just got a 1.0 release, but has. in some form for close to a decade. And this is, you know, get in, get loot, get out. Yeah, basically, I think you could probably trace its origins all the way back to Daisy. Some people have done that online. I think that's accurate, but certainly escape from Tarkov.

And the division's dark zone mode are kind of notable, like, moments for the extraction shooter to get some definition. And basically, you know, as you described it, it is what it is. You go into a hostile environment of which there are computer-controlled enemies. and there are also other players who can opt into violence with you. It's not prescribed. It's not necessarily expected. Your real goal there is to just collect a bunch of stuff and then get out alive. Because if you die, you lose everything you came in with.

You lose everything you found. And depending on how well maintained your inventory back home is, that could either be a minor bruise that you put a Band-Aid over by grabbing your next best gun, or it has completely reset you back to zero. So it's got a sort of dark soulsy kind of punishing vibe in terms of some substantial losses resulting from death. So I've got about 110 hours in Art Graders right now. So a lot of people are worried about me. They haven't seen me.

It's safe to say that this game has grabbed me quite a bit. And I think it's because it really tosses the script, the standard script of shooters in general out the window. you know, like Zach was just talking about kind of, you know, the setup of like, you know, a Colggy match or a battlefield match. And they're kind of largely the same, right? Like you load in, you are inherently fighting other people, even if it's a battle royale, you know, there's a lot of freedom in a battle royale. But, you know, your goal is to come out victorious by means through killing other people.

And arc raters, while you absolutely can be killed by people and you absolutely can kill people, it's kind of completely optional to you. I mean, there are some, like, you know, you can earn. some like challenges for shooting at other Raiders. But I would say that's marginal at best because the real kind of meat and potatoes of this game is getting in to collect stuff that you can then craft for better gear back home to then take out and have subsequently better runs each time. And this is new IP as opposed to very old IP in the case of the other two franchises.

And there's the third person versus first person distinction, as you mentioned. And yeah, as you noted, their battlefield call of doing. primarily PVP, player versus player. Arc Raiders is more PVPVE. Player versus player versus environments, right? So it's a little different from, say, Hell Divers, which is more PVEE, and maybe Arc Raiders could evolve in that direction. And it can already be that depending on how you play, essentially.

Exactly. Yeah. It's more malleable. And I guess we can maybe discuss this first from sort of an industry standpoint, what this means for online multiplayer shooters in general, live service games, the mega publishers involved here, because ever since Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, Call of Duty has reigned supreme in sales. A Call of Duty game has been the best-selling game in the U.S. at least in 13 of the past 16 years with the only interruptions in its reign resulting from GTA 5, Red Dead Red Dead Redemption

2, and Hogwarts legacy. So you come at the king. You best not miss. And Battlefield didn't. It peaked at almost three quarters of a million concurrent players on Steam last month, sold more than 7 million copies in its first week. Arc Raiders sold 4 million copies in its first 10 days or so, peaked at almost half a million on Steam, where right now, at least, it's well above Battlefield. As for Blackop 7, it's tough to say.

It peaked at right around 100,000 on Steam, but Call of Duty is also on non-Steem platforms like BattleNed and the Microsoft store, and it's on PC and console GamePass, so it's tough to do apples to apples comparisons. But if you compare it to Black Op 6, that peaked over 300K concurrence on Steam last year. So this does seem somewhat suggestive of a decline, as do the Metacritic scores.

And if we look at the PC scores only to keep things consistent, we've got 86 for Arc Raiders, 82 for Battlefield, and 80 for BlackOps. seven. So, Zach, maybe you could break down the Battlefield versus Call of Duty showdown the head specifically here because it really seems like Battlefield was very blatantly, specifically, ostentatiously gunning for Call of Duty and just coming for the Crown this year. Not if you ask them. There are just two franchises that can both.

No, yes, I think it is a little weird to think about that because Vincent Pella is leading Battlefield six. Right. And Vince Appella created Call of Duty. So, like, he's kind of trying to take down the monster he created. And he's not going to succeed. Not to be, like, blunt about it, but, like, Calduty is going to have an incredible year.

Like, even though this is not a great game, and even though its steam numbers are down, there are a lot of people who just buy these games because they're the new Call of Duty. It's Call of Duty and Madden. But that's sad. Yeah. I do think Battlefield 6 took a chunk from Call of Duty this year in a way that I think Activision was probably nervous about because they went into this game kind of being like talking a lot about skins and like we're not going to have crazy skins this year and we're

going to be careful about this and that in a way that they usually don't they don't really seem to they were very defensive this year and I do think Battlefield was the reason why and I think Battlefield 6 proved that there is some burnout um with live shooters and arc Raiders is also kind of proving this of the same formula for Call of Duty especially. This formula of like new game every year and you're going to have to, you know, deal of all of the new game. Like everything's changing. And also here's, uh, here's Will Arnett or whoever as a skin and here's beavis

a butt has as a skin and you're just going to have to like it. And I think Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders are offering a different experience of like, we're going to be more grounded. We're going to offer you. We're going to be more like the games you used to play. even though Arc Raiders is very weird and different compared to like a shooter from 2003 it is a cohesive experience

it is not I'm you know I I played Blackop 7 7 over the weekend and within a few matches I was shooting a guy dressed as a zombie and I was shooting a robot and multiplayer like that is not something that happens at Battlefield 6 and that is not something that happens in Arc Raiders in the sense that Arc Raiders doesn't have IP crossovers and stuff like that right yeah and Arc Raiders

just like opens itself up to like completely difference, you know, like I said before, once you take out that win condition of like, I kill you, I win, you have a potential for so many other kinds of experiences. So over the weekend, they had a new map launch and yeah, I've been playing shooters for so long. Like, yeah, a new map is great. And like, what happens? Like, you load it up and a whole bunch of people jump out there and start shooting at each other. And that's not what happened. Like, I mean, it definitely happened a lot on this new map. But my first experience, I loaded into a solo match and, you know, we got into this, like warehouse environment. And I was with five or six other players who could have been my enemy,

but like we were all just kind of like walking around looking at everything with our guns put away. Just, you know, hoping that we each could get, you know, enough loot to get out and that hopefully, you know, one of us was not going to suddenly betray someone else and this could turn into a firefight. And that sort of tension in that, that moment of like, oh, like this is a space where I can opt into violence. Like that does not exist in Battlefield Sex or. of her Blackop 7, like really whatsoever. Yeah, it becomes kind of a social experiment almost. It's like this psychological game.

Not that there isn't violence and there aren't firefights, and that can be satisfying too, especially because you don't get a ton of rounds usually. And so it's, you know, every bullet has to count. And often you're overmatched, especially in the early hours. But it's the rarer encounters with other humans and then the sort of signaling that it's safe to be around you, that you're okay with cooperating. and then is that a work? Is that true?

Are you trying to pretend that everything's okay? And then you're going to shoot someone in the back and take their loot? Or are you actually cooperating? Yeah, that aspect of things is different for sure. And, you know, I guess Battlefield's going after Call of Duty really may be sensed some vulnerability and some fatigue. And it helps that there's no new battlefield every single year. So there's going to be some excitement around a brand new game like Arc Raiders or even

Battlefield that has installments every several years as opposed to just the iterative Blackop Six, now Blackop Seven, one year later, right? How hyped can you get about that really? But Battlefield's, you know, even like the marketing, right? The ad campaigns kind of like mocking Call of Duties, celebrities studied ads and just very much making an appeal to a certain type of player. And, you know, it's not as if fandom of these games needs to be mutually exclusive. of like, you know, Zach, you played and reviewed both Battlefield and Call of Duty.

And you've each been sort of embedded in your respective beats, Battlefield for Zach and Arc Raiders for Claire, which probably hasn't left that much time to play other things. But for someone who's not playing these things for work, but for fun, there's, in theory, a place in your rotation for more than one of them or all of them, right? It's just, you know, what are you in the mood for? If you were to look at who's playing this game, I bet there's a lot more crossover than, like, the angry comments would like to have you believe. I think it's just very easy for people to pick a side.

People love picky sides. But I think this year in particular has shown that the way to take on Call of Duty is not to take on Call of Duty with the same kind of. For a long time, the way people tried to come at Call of Duty was like, we're going to be making an arena military shooter. But here's our gimmick or here's our, I think the way you take down Call of Duty or compete with Call of Duty is what we're seeing, which is either. you go the exact opposite of the crazy over-the-top thing that it's become, which is Battlefield's approach,

or you just go in the exact opposite direction of what Callardy is, which is what Art Raders is doing. That's how you compete. And that's why I think this year, it might feel like there's a lot more tribalism because these games are, they are speaking to very different people. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the unifying, for sure. Yeah, the unifying element between all of them, right, is like the challenge and thrill of, like, pointing and shooting. right you know like like that that basic game thing and so what we're seeing here yeah like three very different approaches to satisfying that so it gives people a lot of you know reasons to be like well you know i've played every call of duty every single year and and sure i'd like shooting and

stuff but you know maybe um you know something where i really need to like hold on to what i earn from combat you know so therefore arc writers might really appeal or you know yeah i don't like you know necessarily seeing bruce willis running around in my call of duty and that's one of the more team options, probably. So I'm going to go over to Battlefield 6, which is a bit more grounded and has destructible environments. And if you're someone like me who plays all three of these, there's an experience where it's like, okay, I'm kind of getting tired of getting my ass kicked in college duty over

and over and making no progress. So I'm going to go pop to Arc Raiders and have a cooperative experience. And oh, I had a bad time in Arc Raiders now. Someone lied to me and screwed me over. I'm going to go play Battlefield. They also can just offer you different flavors of shooter, which is, I think, also useful for people. Yeah, it can be complimentary, not necessarily competitive. It's a great time to play online shooters right now, is what we're saying.

Right, very much. And perhaps also relevant to people's purchasing decisions, Ark Raiders is $40. It's more of a budget price for the base game, whereas Battlefield and Call of Duty are the full standard $70 for the regular edition. And Claire, I think Arc Raiders part of the hype surrounding it has been the notion that this is kind of the breakout game for this genre. That, yes, there have been other extraction shooters and there's escape from Duckov, which has been a big breakout in addition to escape from Tarkov. But this feels like the moment where everyone's saying, okay, the extraction shooter is ready for its close up. And Arc Raiders has really nailed the formula. So can you explain why there was some barrier to.

entry with extraction shooters or why there maybe still is and how arc graders kind of sands down those barriers to make it a bit more accessible. For sure, yeah. So, you know, the extraction shooter is just, it's, it is a hard proposition to someone to be like, hey, when you die, you are going to lose all of the stuff you earned. It is a hard proposition to also put that mechanic in a game that is very tactical and grounded. I mean, you know, there are ways in which, and I'll get into like how, you know, Arc graders has kind of streamlined a lot of extraction shooter elements, but it's still a pretty,

you know, slow burn game. It's not like Call of Duty where it's, you know, like your head is on a swivel and you're jumping off of walls and you're doing all of these things. I mean, sometimes to jump off of a wall in Art Graders, but, but it's a bit more, it's a bit more grounded. Sometimes you get stuck on walls too. You can absolutely. I was getting stuck on some walls last night. But, you know, Escape from Tarkov, which I think, as I said before, like Daisy is probably the genesis of this stuff. But Tarkov is really where, like, we get, you know, it's in the title, Escape, right? You know, these things take form. And Tarkov is just, you got to keep track of the specific ammo calibers that you have for your guns.

You know, that you have to pay attention to, like, you know, whether you broke your arm or something like that. I mean, I haven't played in a long time, so maybe these things have been streamlined themselves. but it's a very, it really boils the challenge down to being like, we want to simulate the experience of you operating a fighting body on a battlefield down to like thirst. And our creators doesn't go that far. It has a much more streamlined ammo system. So it's just heavy medium and light.

There's an energy category as well. But you're not keeping track of like, you know, whether or not you broke your leg because you fell off of a building. You just have a health meter that kind of. goes down. And then of course, there's just so many different systems of advancement in the game. There you can, you know, you level up constantly. There's quests to do. There's challenges to complete. So it's like, yeah, I've gone through a variety of matches where like I got completely murdered and lost like a fantastic gun and some fantastic gear. But when I got out, I leveled up and I

was able to get a new skill. And now I'm, you know, permanently better. Well, permanently until my, we do the character resets in December. But, you know, Escape from Torquette. Tarkov is really not friendly in that way, and it's kind of not interested in being friendly that way. Escape from Tarkov and shows up with an aggressiveness and expects you to meet that moment. Our creators also has an aggressiveness that it expects you to be prepared for, but there's far more kind of standard live service trappings of making sure that you are constantly on, you know, going up in unlocking new things and being able to do new stuff. So it's just, it's an easier game to lose, I would say.

I also think Art Graders, like, this is going to, I'm trying to figure a way to say this without angering some people, but like, Art Grators is very Fortnite. And I think that is, and I know that that's, I know some people don't want to hear this. But what I mean by that is it's third person, which is a big deal. It might not seem like a big deal,

but there are a lot of people who will not touch a first person shooter, just period. They won't touch a first person game, period. You saw that with Indiana Jones when that thing got announced and it was first person, there was this huge uproar for people like, I can't believe they made it first person. I hate first person. A lot of people, especially on console, they hate first person.

They don't want to touch it. So being third person helped. Second was like Claire said, they simplified a lot of the bullshit that's in Tarkoff. I mean, great mechanics that everyone loves. They simplified a lot of that stuff. That helped a lot too. And thirdly, like what she would say is that like Fortnite, there's always a thing to be going for.

You're always on multiple treadbills. So, like, you lost everything, which I hate extraction shooters up until Arc Raiders. I played them, and I hated that concept. Art Graders was like Fortnite to me with Battle Royals, where I went, okay, I get this now. You're giving me meters to fill, challenges to complete. It's got an aesthetic that is wonderful, which is also not talked about enough, but Arc Raiders is not just grimy military men in mud. It is like an interesting world with interesting things happening. Yeah.

It's a really good-looking game, too. It also sounds amazing. People don't talk about the sound design in that game enough. And I'm not talking about shooting the guns. That is good. I just mean the menus. It runs well. It can be janky.

It can be buggy from time to time, but generally, performance is smooth. But I think that's why this thing has broke out in a way that we've not seen an extraction shooter break out in the scale of our creators. There have been successes, but I mean in the scale of across all platforms. And I think it's because it is very much the Fortnite version of a, extraction shooter. And I don't mean that in that it's cartoony or whatever.

I just mean that in that it knows how to sand, like you said, to sand off just enough, but it's still a pain in the ass game at times in a way that people who like extracts shooters like. I think we saw with Marathon, the playtests, where you can go too far and you

can lose the stuff that people who like these games care about. Yeah, and Marathon feels like it doesn't know if it wants to be a hero shooter or an extraction shooter, and that's one of the big problems. Yes. And I think if I was bungee right now, I would be very nervous because I think Marathon was going. Their entire plan of Marathon was we're going to be that breakout extraction game.

We're going to be on console. We're going to be easy to play. And then I think our graders came out. And there can't be two breakout games. That's not how this works. And I was totally here for that, that marathon breakout. I was like, I remember one that first trailer, which yes, I was excited as much as anyone was with like how good it looked, but I was like, oh my God, you know, an extraction shooter that isn't just like, as you were saying,

like a bunch of, you know, grimy men in the mud. I was like, you're something a bit more imaginative and all of that. And it has, you know, I mean, it still looks very good, but it has not managed to deliver in its closed tests, at least anywhere near the kind of experience I'm getting out of our graders. There can be only one. But that's the age-old story, really, in gaming is that often there is some formula that's close to nailing it completely. and then another game comes along and builds on that foundation. It's like going from EverQuest, which obviously was popular, it's Evercrack.

But then Blizzard comes along and makes it a bit more accessible and a bit easier to play. And then suddenly you get, wow, which people are playing 20 plus years later. Yeah, right. You know, Fortnite wasn't the first Battle Royale. Sure. But it was the first one that kind of figured out how to make it easy to play on consoles and made it accessible. And then you basically, it's a race.

I feel like how this has tend to work and tend to work in games is you get like three. There's like three that get to get established in a genre and then everybody else never gets to break in. And so I think now there's a race. Who's going to be a skate from Tarkoff? You could argue was the first, but I think Arcoraners is really the first. So now there's like space for two more. There's space for two more multiplayer extraction shooters and then that's it. Nobody else is going to be able to land it.

That's how MOBAs worked. Yeah. That's how tactical shooters worked. that's how the first person shooter, it was like Battlefield Call of Duty and like nobody else can really catch it. You have a window now. So if you're developing an extraction shooter, you have about a two years to get it. Yeah. And it's like they're rotation. And then they're stuck. They're anchored to those games. Yeah. Yeah. And it's likely to just be a tug of war over like who managed to streamline the rough edges of the extraction shooter more seamlessly. But even then you're going to find people like I don't know if they were to streamline art graders any further. I don't know that I would invest another 100 hours in it. Like right now, the game is managing to sit in a very nice sweet spot where it's like,

yes, I feel the frustration of loss when I die, but like I can get out there again pretty quickly as compared to like Tarkov where like losing everything. This was really really punishing. And if you don't like fighting people, guess what? Call it Rudy has you covered this year. Sure. Because Endgame is essentially a distraction shooter without PVP. It's their extra mode that they unlock the campaign.

And it's kind of weird to play that in Arc Raiders back to back because it's literally the same kind of basic idea, get in, get loot, complete stuff, and there's other players, but you don't fight them. What do you think of Redshank? Because these games, they kind of want to be all encompassing. They want to be everything, right? And so they want a mode of every kind.

Oh, you want a battle royale? We can be that in Battlefield. In addition, you know, there's an app for that inside Battlefield, right? And Battlefield 6 even has portal. It's like if you don't like our modes, make it yourself. Yeah, but if you're kind of attempting to do everything, it's the old, you try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one. Like, if that's part of your focus and for someone else, it's their entire concentration, then is your version going to be as good? So do you find that that's as sticky as something that's dedicated to being a battle royale, for instance?

I think RedSec has potential, but I think it just, like you said, it's very clearly. working with the scraps of Battlefield 6 and working with what's there and trying to build a battle royale out of it. And it's also going after war zone very clearly with the way it handles armor and all that. I like RedSec. I think they're trying to make it feel battlefield. And I think that's weirdly, that's its Achilles heel is because they're like, well, it's got to have tanks and it's got to have jeeps and it's got to have classes and it's got to have all those elements that you know from Battlefield, but when you put that in a Battle Royale, it becomes hard to balance. It becomes a situation where almost every time I play that game, it ends with jeeps and tanks,

because, of course, why would you not be in a tank if that's an option in a battle royale? And there's no solo option because all of the characters are built around squad and supporting each other and benefit each other. And that's a ding against it because a lot of people just want to play by themselves in these games. Yeah. See, I was going to bring that up because I don't know if this is. is too hyperbolic, but this almost feels like the moment when online multiplayer shooter campaigns kind of died because, I mean, that's part of why I'm there. And that's not the main draw for

most people, even though most people are single player gamers. You just wrote up some research from Amperior analysis, Zach, this week that showed that the majority of gamers do prefer single player games over multiplayer games. And I would probably put myself in that category too. But inside these multiplayer games, of course, you can play them solo, but historically they have come with campaigns that were solo only. And this year, it feels like they half-assed it, right? That nobody really liked the battlefield campaign. The Call of Duty campaign is kind of consensus, maybe the worst ever. And also, as I alluded to earlier, has some limitations where it can't be paused. It's really designed to be played co-op online only. You can't play it. So between that and, you know,

arc graders doesn't have a single player campaign narrative the same way that those others do, though it has some sort of interesting environmental storytelling at least. But this feels like the year when Battlefield and Call of Duty just decided that we can kind of phone in the campaign and focus on the multiplayer because maybe that's what people are here for. It's so strange, though, because Black Op. 6 had one of my favorite kind of action-packed holiday campaigns. It's alternated, like every other year going from good to terrible.

Like forcing developers to work on the next entry and giving them 12 months to squeeze it out will lead to a bad product. I don't know. Maybe more testing needs to be done. Yeah. I mean, when Modern Warfare 2, 2020 came out and I reviewed it, I wasn't like necessarily impressed by a lot of what it was doing. But like in hindsight, after these other campaigns we've gotten, I go back and I look at that 2022 game. And I'm like, wow. Yeah.

This is actually a really good quality, a single-player shooter experience. But, you know, I don't know what those are in 2025. You know, we had like a decent one with Doom earlier this year, which did not have a multiplayer mode. And that has not, you know, maybe it is up to the quality that's inherent in Doom the Dark Ages. But Doom the Dark Ages has not broken through as like the, hey, if you really want single-player campaigns of the shooter variety, this is it. I mean, I would certainly recommend people try it. but it is not what everyone's talking about right now for sure. Yeah.

It's nominated for Best Action Game. Mm-hmm. And Arc Raiders really, like, it's an interesting setting. You know, it's this post-apocalyptic kind of... I'd play a single-player shooter in that world. I would too. You know, I'm sort of disappointed that there isn't more storytelling going on in Arc Raiders. It feels like there's the potential for there to be.

There's potential. And it's this interesting world. It's like, what happened here? Like, where do these robots that are hunting me come from? What do they want? Yeah, it reminds me of like a, you know, a good lore book for like D&D or something. Yes. Like, you're to use this base material to inspire future stories.

And that's kind of where Our Graders is. It's set after two post-apocalyptic events. And it's not really clear, like, how things had gotten so bad necessarily. And certainly the presence of these robots is not very explained. But there's, like, hints that there's more coming and that we might understand the origin of these robots. and that maybe it came from people, rich people who like fled the planet as, you know, climate change was destroying it. But like, it's all, you know, guess work at this point. No one really knows what the hell is going on, which contributes to the theater of it, right?

You're in this hostile environment where it's like, whoa, there's like this, you know, spider robot that can like leap for, you know, hundreds of feet to chase me. And like, where the hell did that come from? I don't know, man, but we just got to get the hell out of here. I'm like, right. That does seem like something Elon Musk would make, though. Oh, God. He'd be like, this thing is awesome. look at this, it can jump 100 meters to kill you, and be like, why'd you make that?

But I also think art graders not being overstuffed of story is a good thing, because I think there's the problem of it. If they had packed, I think, of too much narrative and too much story, it would get in the way almost of it. Absolutely. I feel like it's in a good spot right now. It kind of reminds me, this is very strange, but it kind of reminds me of Tynefall, the original one, because you remember, that didn't have a single player campaign.

You had to play the multiplayer to get the story. So it's kind of doing the Tynefall thing, but not bad, because I did not like how Tyenfall did that. Good game, but I don't like the story. So I think Arc Raiders is a good spot with how it's handling its narrative. But I think, like Claire said, now they have a foundation that people like. So maybe a few years from now they release an Arc Raider spinoff game that's set during the fall when the robots have showed up.

And it's a single player thing that uses their tech and stuff. So, yeah, Arc Raiders is weird because it's almost like, It came out of nowhere, and now it could potentially end up being a massive franchise like a Battlefield or a Cold Duty. Yes, for sure. It could morph into the Matrix or like the Finals. Horizon or something. Right, exactly. Although the finals does have cool destructability, much like Battlefield.

It's very cool. Yeah. What was the last time you heard someone mention the finals that does account this moment that I'm saying? Right. Just now. Just now. Yeah. NBA Finals, maybe.

But yeah. So for people who care less about the bottom line for Microsoft or, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, you know, but want to know, like, which of these games is good and which will remain good? I mean, speaking of guesswork, right? It's really hard to forecast. There's recency bias. It's so hard to know whether those player counts will keep up. In most cases, they don't. But if you had to look ahead and kind of study the roadmaps here and just the stickiness of the gameplay and the potential for evolution and depth, do you see yourselves adding Arc Raiders to your rotation permanently or quasi-permanently? Is this the game that you think you'll

be playing for the long run? Will you continue to dip into battlefield and Call of Duty? Claire, you've been playing all your waking hours in Arc Raiders. Will that continue to be the case? I think, I think, you know, provided they don't change anything, which would include, like, adding a PVE mode or something. I think once if they start fracturing up the player base, we're in for some trouble. Like, it's in, as I said before, it's in a sweet spot. where I actually really don't feel any compelling reason outside of the necessities of my job to download another shooter and play that.

Like, this feels like it for me. This is the hobby of playing a shooting game. It's got some things I don't care for. Maybe I would prefer it in first person. I don't know. But like, this offers everything I've wanted in a shooter for a very long time. But I think the real make or break moment for our creators

is going to be this December when they allow people to wipe their characters. So in a lot of these games where you're a match, massing serious arsenals, they will do a server wipe to reset everyone back to zero. It's a way of kind of, it's like a controlled forest burn of like all of the chaotic weaponry. Our creators is not mandating that on its players. Instead, once you reach a certain point, you can choose to wipe your character and start over. And that to me is going to be the big moment is whether or not this very active fan base is willing to do this all over again. I certainly as hell I am because I'm a masochist.

But I really enjoy it. I would say I don't think I will do that. Exactly. Coming from the Fortnite side and those shooters side, that sounds horrible to me. I don't want to do that. So yeah, that will be a curious moment. How will the community split in that way? Exactly.

So December I think is going to be a serious make-or-break moment for our creators. If this community is willing to be like, yeah, I'm going to level up all of my workshops again and hunt down all those rusted gears and do a new skill tree build and reclaim all the guns, used to have. I'm here for that personally. I don't know that many people who are new to the genre are going to be as enthusiastic about that concept unless there's really good incentives for it.

You do get some like XP boosts for doing this, but you know, we'll have to see how that stuff works out once it's like actually live because no one can reset their character as of right now. Lastly, no discussion of these games would be complete without getting into the AI of it all because these are big games because they're all connected to AI use in one way or another. Their releases have intensified the ongoing conversation about the use of AI in gaming. Arc Raiders uses an AI-powered text-to-speech system in addition to voice actors who've consented to have their voices used

to train the AI. Both embark and Nexon have talked a lot about how they think AI is useful in gaming development, how it's the future. Nexon's CAO said, I think it's important to assume that every game company is now using AI, which led to a chorus of not us, not this game company from various other game companies. Blackop 7 seems to use AI generated art, which is one reason why its user rating on Metacritic is sub 2 as we speak. Battlefield's hands are clean, relatively speaking. Generative AI was used in the game's early stages to, quote, allow more time and more space to be

creative, but evidently none of that ended up in the finished product, though certainly the developers of the game have talked in admiring ways about the potential for AI and how it could be used. So what do we make of all of this? Because first of all, what we mean by AI is in itself a debate, and there's a lot of disagreement. Are we talking about just machine learning and procedural generation and ways that developers can use tools to assist themselves, which, you know, is a lot less controversial, or are we talking about generative AI, just creating art or writing or voices by essentially plagiarizing existing work that humans made? And so it's the latter that tends to prompt the swiftest and strongest backlash.

And so that's what happened here. And it's kind of the one black mark on Arc Raiders, which on the whole has been a positive story, but that's the drawback. That's the thing that, you know, you can't go without mentioning because they've been pretty unabashed, pretty unapologetic about their use of these tools and how they think it has enabled them to develop games more quickly and more efficiently. So, Claire, how do you navigate that as you spend much of your life in the game? I always risk getting myself in trouble with AI because I come from a sort of like avant-garde artistic background where the concept of like generative stuff is not offensive.

You know, this is something that goes back to like the work of John Cage. And certainly since electronic music has been around, there's been ways of generating melodies and things like this. So sometimes it's like, I don't know, what kind of a conversation are we having here? Are we having a conversation about like what is authorship, who makes something, what is real in a digital sense? Like for me, the type of person I am,

it can spiral out into postmodern observations about reality, which aren't really beneficial or helpful. I think it is notable that, like, well, yeah, Embark Studios in Exxon are like, oh, yeah, Sayai is here to stay. They haven't really been forthcoming about, like, what text to speech model specifically is being done here? Like, how does this work? Is this as kind of otherwise as innocent and as widely celebrated as like Hotsonamiku was?

Or like text to speech stuff that's been around for decades at this point? Or is this something more sinister? And we don't really know. But what is clear is like if you are having your characters voiced by something that is not a person in a booth every single time, you are deprioritizing the impact of that

in this game. It becomes basically folly, like the sound of like wind blowing in the trees. And is that what we want these voiced characters to be? So, yeah, I think like that's kind of where my brain gets around this stuff.

You know, like I was playing our graders one night and I heard like the sound of wind blowing and I was like, I actually don't know how that sound was created. Did they actually record wind blowing? Or is this like, you know, a synthesizer put through a low-pass filter with noise and they're just sweeping it, which means it's an artificial wind? So then am I upset about the artificial voices? I don't know. You know, so I kind of arrive at a place of just like, I don't know.

I think once we start picking apart like what is real in media, that's a very complicated and busy conversation. How do you wrestle with all this sack? Fuck, Gen AI. I'm very, so for me, I understand what people say and what Claire said, but I still think that like, there is a big difference between using the type of tool she has talked about and then telling basically a robot, go steal 10,000 paintings for me and come back and make a dinosaur on a cliff so I could put it in my movie or my game and not have to pay anyone. And that's where I get hung up. And I think with Arc Raiders, what Arc Raiders is doing, I don't love the idea that we're just going to like replace voice actors with an AI voice essentially. But I understand that like they got the consent from the people. They were paid.

There was a contract that was signed to like do this. And so in that regard, I think they did this the most ethical way you can. And so I think I am okay with how Art Graders does it Though I also would add I don't think they need the fucking voices I think Art graders Absolutely yeah That's the biggest issue

They're talking and I'm just like Do you really need to be talking or could I just read this in a paragraph Arc Raiders I think and I think Claire would agree Would still be a hugely popular game and really good If those AI voices weren't in it Totally I mean there's sometimes like during the gameplay When you mark things on the ping system And your character will be like

There's a Rocketeer here by the the field depot or whatever. Right. And I'm like, whoa, that's actually really specific and, like, actually beneficial in the moment to, like, communicate to another player, you know, by means of a system in the game to say, like, specifically where something is. But all of the, like, you know, the exposition is, it's very lifeless. And it feels just like, did we need this at all? Right. Yeah, it's a double-edged sword because there are certain cases like that where you probably, it wouldn't even be feasible to pay someone to request.

chord every possible variation of, right? Probably not. Where something is on a map and being able to sort of signify that in real time. The other side of it, though, is that those line readings, because they're not actually being read, tend to be pretty lifeless, right? And so I think there is a place for text to speech. You know, if you're talking about text to speech for accessibility reasons for articles online, let's say, right?

You know, you can't possibly pay someone to read. every single article published online. And so, okay, we accept kind of this low bar of, are they mostly pronouncing things correctly? Okay, it's good enough. But in a video game, that lifeless performance, like literally lifeless performance, it does sap something from the experience. You're very conscious of the fact that there's just no inflection here, right? There's no emphasis. It just sounds sort of strange and robotic because it is. So then is it better to have some sort of voice there, if it takes you out of that experience, or is it better to have fewer voices, right? Even if you have to be relegated to text or something or, you know, it's just not even

specified, at least it doesn't give you that feeling of, oh, a machine is saying this thing. We can talk about art graders voice stuff, but like they all agreed. They were paid. It's a, it's a smaller studio, like, whatever. Call a duty using AI art. And that, Like, that's fucking crazy. And the fact that the biggest, one of the biggest publishers in the world, publishing the largest franchise in the world that makes more money than we can literally count every day from selling skins and all that kind of crap is instead of paying artists probably pretty poorly, because I can guarantee you they don't pay much for this art. As I said, going, fuck that.

Let's just generate it and shove it into the game. And then having the audacity to come back later and be like, it was an accident. Like, what do you mean it was an accident? Like, some of these are animated. Some of these, like, they're in the game. Did you slip and hit the key, the button on the keyboard that published your game and go, oh, no. Like, it's crazy. Yeah, we've heard that excuse sometimes and I buy it.

You know, it was a placeholder that just slipped into the finished product and they meant to swap it out or something. Okay. But sometimes that seems like a flimsy excuse. And, you know, it's tough. Like I think when some people hear AI, they instinctively recoil and say, no, never. And I'm sympathetic to that. I believe that there are some applications where it might make sense, you know, just because if it's a developer that can't possibly afford to pay people for something or maybe just to generate something at scale, there's just. no way to feasibly do it.

You know, again, you can quibble with, should it actually be done? Is it actually additive in that case? But I can imagine some applications, you know, when people talk about, well, you have NPCs who can just respond to you indefinitely. And, you know, maybe that could be kind of cool if it's done in a lifelike way. And maybe it's not possible to do that with human voice actors, being able to voice every possible permutation and response. I can imagine it helping and making game worlds more immersive.

eventually. And I can imagine certain tools saving developers time and leading to better games and more humane development conditions just because you're kind of, you know, taking some shortcuts that once might have been grunt work for someone. Now, does that inevitably lead to fewer people working on the game? What I was going to say is, like look at Activision, like do you trust that Activision is going to be given AI tools that allow them to replace people? and their response is going to be, oh, don't worry, these people will do something else, or the response is going to be what we've already seen. I do not.

No, it'll be cost-cutting. This is the general labor issue at the heart of artificial intelligence in general. It's like, okay, you're promising this utopia. And right now you're saying, okay, and we're going to take your jobs, and we're not interested at all in how this technology or any sort of effort could be used to fill that hole once it's taken from you. And I think that's what a lot of people are reacting to is that. AI very aggressively feels like it's taking things away from us and is being forced down our throats in very aggressive ways.

I would argue that most of our technology has been forced down our throats. But there is a way that AI seems to be more vocal. And it's we're going to take over and do everything this way. I also just think when it comes to like call it. It is really depressing that you do, you spend all. this time working on a challenge in that game. And the reward that Activision fucking gives you is a thing they generated at five seconds and didn't even care to count the fingers on the hand in it.

There's something about that that makes me go, then why am I here? If you obviously don't care, and I played your campaign, you don't care. If you obviously don't care about it, then why am I giving you $80 a year to buy this game? Why am I spending my time? Whereas with Art Graders, the voice stuff, I'm not a huge. huge fan of it, but it doesn't, like, it doesn't feel like it's ruining my experience. I can kind of mostly ignore it. In some cases, it makes some things arguably better, you know, because like, like, one of the things that Art Graders does also is you can speak through an AI

filter for voice chat. And as a woman with somewhat of a deep voice, I kind of appreciate that, that I'm not going to have to like, you know, deal with anybody's weirdness because I just have this AI model that's, you know, translating my voice. I would like more transparency around how this text speech thing works. Yes. You know, that is very much needed. But it is a stark difference to be like, hey, we're using this to supplant the longevity of a very long game and giving you tools you can use in the middle of the game to like avoid some thorny issues. And Call of Duty is just like, yeah, we pushed a button. Here's, here's an animated character for you. Yeah. I imagine we're mostly aligned when it comes to some of the uses and abuses of this technology as people who write things

and podcast and put things out in the public sphere. Not only do I not want robots to replace me from a self-preservation standpoint, but also, you know, unless it's maybe the way that you were saying, Claire, where perhaps there are applications where a person could use these tools to express themselves creatively, unless it's that, if it's purely replacing a human and you're doing away with that spark of creativity, which is what makes art worthwhile, then I have no interest in that whatsoever. And I kind of despise people who do to some extent. And, you know, when it's call of duty and when it's a money machine that's printing profits like Call of Duty is, then it's particularly egregious, right? Because it's not additive in any way. It's purely cost cutting and

corner cutting. And one imagines that that's only going to get worse if they get away with it. And in a way, I guess I'm glad that this is constantly a story now, because the moment it stops being a story is when we're all so used to it or resigned to it, that it just doesn't even raise red flags anymore. It doesn't even generate publicity. Or perhaps the robots have gotten so good at fooling us that we don't notice anymore. And either of those is sort of a dystopian scenario. So, you know, it's every game that comes out now, it seems as if there's some sort of outrage or backlash about this. And that can itself, get tiresome, but maybe the alternative is worse, because when there's no backlash, then then the machines will have one. And then we'll end up in our graders world and we'll all have to live underground. Gamers have been programmed for basically as long as video games have been around to not trust fucking robots. So it's not surprising to me that we all.

Yeah, we're ready. We've been training for this our whole lives, really. I've got really good at shooting drones out of the sky. So I think I'm ready. Yeah. Okay. Well, we can't declare a winner. exactly here, but if we were going to try to of this online shooters shootout, would we all

be unanimous in saying that arc raiders at least, I mean, it's won by some metrics, and it seems to have won in terms of just pure originality and innovation and being the first of its kind to maybe completely nail the formula. So if we had to anoint a winner here, it would probably be arc raiders, am I safe in saying that? And it sounds like, And Zach, you probably put the most time into Blackop 7 of anyone. And it sounds like that time has not been especially well spent. So if we had to rank them in terms of which you would recommend, would we go, Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, Blackop 7?

I like Battlefield 6 more. But that's fun. But I think if you're declaring a winner in terms of all what you said here, yeah, I think Art Graders, I mean, by a large margin is probably the winner. But if I was recommending a video game to people, the first thing I would ask them is, do you know what an extraction shooter is? If they say yes, then I go,

you're going to love our graders. If they say no, then I have like two more follow-up questions. I have a few follow-up questions before I recommend. I'd be like, well, okay, hold on. Let's let me ask you a few more things. I think for someone looking for like the competitive shooter, as we have known it for a very long time, I think Battlefield 6th probably,

the premier choice of that for this year, Call of Duty, if you're really committed to that. If you hate yourself. If you hate yourself. And art creators, like, if you want something, kind of a fresh take, or I mean, if you're already an extraction shooter fan, you probably have made up your mind, right? Like, you know, someone who knows what an extraction shooter is,

is going to be like, oh, yeah, I've heard about our creators. Right. Yeah. So there's that to consider. It's like what someone is looking for in this. Because Battlefield 6, I have not played it, but everything I've read about it is, you know, I mean, it's had some controversy since it's been out for sure. But, like, that is of a known quantity that we know well,

and it is executing very well on that, whereas Arc Raiders is like, if you want something new, that might also frustrate the bit cheeses out of you. Give this a shot. Okay, well, since we've essentially pronounced Arc Raiders both the most original and the best of the bunch, and since it would be silly of us not to benefit from the wisdom,

Claire has accrued during 110 hours and counting of playtime, and because Claire is, after all, the associate editor of tips and guides, Claire, would you care to impart any tips or guidance? about how to get good at arc graders, assuming you wouldn't rather keep your secrets to success to yourself. Gladly.

So I've got five-ish kind of things that are off the top of my head here. Some are very specific. Some are more, I don't know, philosophical. So let's start with one of those. I would strongly advise, like, when you're playing this game, you have to go in with a plan, you know, as opposed to, like, other shooters

where it's like, okay, I'm just going to, like, shoot at other people for the next 30 minutes or so. Like every time you're going in. It's typically my plan. Yeah. Right, exactly. You should really have a sense of, you know, you want to go in and find a specific item or you want to look for a specific item or you're there to, you know, do a specific

quest. And with that, you know, should come like an awareness of the map. You know, what kinds of enemies are likely to be in any given area, how hard a given area is. Reacting in Arc Raiders is really risky. Like, if you're responding to something that you didn't plan for, there's a higher likelihood of loss there. So the more you can kind of like maintain an awareness of where you are and what you're supposed to be doing there, kind of the better off you're going to be. So a more kind of like explicit tip would be, you know, when you kind of lose everything in the game, the game provides

free loadouts, which they're not, you know, you're not going to be, you know, wiping the map with everybody with these loadouts, but they give you enough to be competent. And those are fine for just getting back out there or for doing a trial run. I'll often grab a free loadout because I'm like, okay, I know I want to go to this area on this map. Let me just go in with a free load out. So if I die, I don't lose anything good. But once you come back with a free load out,

you can take that free load out augment and trade it from Lance in the trader section of the game for any of the augments, which basically allow you to either be more loot focused, more combat focused, or kind of more, I forget the term they for in the game right now, but it allows you to take more quick use items. So it's like a tactical kind of pack. I suggest that people, once you're done with a free loadout run, trade that free load out augment for a loot augment from Lance,

and then start working on your loot gathering game. So the next one I would say is to listen to as much of the game as possible. I think we talked about this. Like Zach had mentioned the audio in the game, it's just fantastic. And it really is a game where it's like, oh, I'm hearing gunshots. Well, those gunshots are not a part of the ambient environment. That is an actual fight that is happening.

And if it sounds like two types of player guns fighting at each other, well, then you're starting to know that, oh, there's a PVP scenario going on, I don't know, 300 meters away from me. Maybe I want to avoid that. Maybe I don't. Or, oh, I hear somebody clearly fighting one of the more antagonistic enemies that are out there. A lot of stuff is given away by noise. So the more you are listening to the surroundings around you,

the more you're going to be able to anticipate what's likely to be coming your way or what is happening with where you're going. Similarly, my next tip is to ping raider flares. So I play on PC, so for ping, it's the middle mouse button. I do not remember what it is for a controller. But whenever a player dies, they send up a flare that can be seen from almost anyone who is outside in a map.

And what I have discovered is you can ping those raider flares. And when you do that, it tells you how many meters away that raider flare is, which is so important for knowing, oh, that's only 300 meters away from me. That's not very far. Either I should get the hell away from there, or if I'm up for a fight, I should go to that area preparing for one. And kind of the raider flares already do that, but the fact that you can ping them and see exactly how many meters away will give you

an idea as to whether or not that fight is something you probably need to worry about or not at all. Like I've pinged, you know, raider flares that are like a thousand meters away. And I'm like, cool, that's someone else's problem. But if it's 200 meters away, I might have trouble coming my way very soon. And the last tip is to accept that everything is ephemeral. Because honestly, in a game where you really... Just generally in life or an art grader specifically. It's probably good advice for life in general.

But for arc graders, like, because you could, you know, get a really great gun and lose it within the first five minutes, you just have to kind of accept that, like, oh, this cool thing I have right now, I might lose. But on, you know, the other kind of perspective there is that like, you now know about that gun, right? So it's like everything is a firm role. You'll lose it. But really what you're gaining is knowledge.

So you're learning tactics. You're learning things to deploy for future missions and stuff like that. The concrete things you have in the moment, that's what you have in the moment. It could be taken away from you just by chance. You know, any turn on the map, you know, someone might jump out or, you know, one of the AI enemies might be more aggressive than you were planning and you'll just lose everything. So the sooner that you can kind of accept that nature, the easier of a time you're going to have with this game overall. Yeah, it's the Neil McCauley in heat wisdom. Don't let yourself get attached to anything you're not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.

Or if you get killed by a robot drone, one or the other. Okay, well, that was very helpful. It's almost as if dispensing tips is your job or something. A little bit, yeah. Okay, Claire Jackson, Zachs-Wisen, thanks so much for being here. Is there anything you would care to plug aside from the website you work for? You should follow Katako on Blue Sky. We are trying to build up our following there.

So follow the Kataka Blue Sky account. That's my recommendation, too. All right. And don't play Blackop 7. There's no winners in the shooter war, but there are losers. Got it. You will be both a winner and a loser if you play any of these games at some points, but I can agree with you on that as a regular reader of Kotaku.

Love the site. Love what you all do there. And I hope you get to keep making it. So thanks to both of you for joining me. Thanks to Steve Alma Lovin, Alman, for producing this podcast. and to Arjuna Rengopal for not objecting when I added this episode to the schedule. Thanks to our listeners for listening and contacting us at RingiverseGaming at gmail.com. And now it is time to extract from this episode.

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