Something I love about videogames is the way that a single line of patch notes can have a disproportionate butterfly effect on millions of sessions. This little sentence, part of today’s Shrouded Sky update, will alter the fate and behavior of countless raiders:
Wolfpack – Added Rocketeer Driver as a crafting cost.
The Wolfpack is Arc Raiders’ most valuable grenade—a get-out-of-trouble-now ripcord that one-shots or cripples the most troublesome Arc, has good range, and locks onto targets automatically. It’s a prized throwable for Matriarch and Queen raids and already something you’re happy to find when looting.
With this change, Embark will begin to reduce the number of Wolfpacks in circulation by making acquiring them much more challenging—until today, a Wolfpack could be crafted with three explosive compounds and two Arc Motion Cores, which themselves could be crafted at the Refiner workbench from easy-to-acquire materials. If you wanted a Wolfpack, you probably had the parts lying around to make one. Now players will probably go on “Rocketeer runs” in order to gather the rare part that produces Wolfpacks. It should spark livelier looting around Rocketeer husks, leading to more betrayals, traps, and higher-stakes trades around a mob that experienced players previously avoided. Rocketeers are officially big game.
The cold metal heart of a Rocketeer, ready to be repurposed into the cold metal cluster missile of a Wolfpack. (Image credit: Embark Studios)
It’s one of the most interesting and funnily recursive changes yet to Arc Raiders’ still-nascent gear economy. The #1 tool for quickly dealing with a Rocketeer, the Wolfpack, now itself requires the precious organ of a Rocketeer. You will now kill Rocketeers in order to get the part that allows you to make the thing that kills Rocketeers. Which you use to kill Rocketeers. Which contain the ingredients necessary to kill Rocketeers.
Alpha and omega; a closed cycle of Rocketeer life and death. It’s like in nature, the reproductive seed cones of some trees only open and spread in the presence of wildfire heat. The fire is both destructive and regenerative to the forest.
Most experienced players would probably argue that this small but significant crafting recipe change needed to happen. Evidenced by frontline war footage like “When The Whole Server Wolfpacks the Queen in Arc Raiders,” their power as a delete button is at odds with easy availability. I am a fan of epic-tier ARC parts having more meaning within the game’s economy: until now they’ve mostly been just a source of money, but this will make bagging them, one way or another, more memorable.
A second patch note in the list of bullets reads, “Fixed an issue where the Rocketeer sometimes would not shoot despite having a clear view of its target.” Are Rocketeers also more dangerous? I don’t think so—I haven’t noticed that Rocketeers fight any differently from the two test runs I made this afternoon. It sounds like this might be more of an edge-case behavior rather than reprogramming the combat systems of Space Jesus, as it’s called by some. Though thousands of players have used the Rocketeer as a surfboard (now 3.7% of all players, according to achievement data), most players would rank it as the deadliest Arc that was in the game at launch—it’s a death sentence to be caught by one in the open—and certainly it isn’t the enemy that that needs a firmware update.
The next deadliest Arc, most likely, is going to be whatever this terrible thing is that players have begun spotting in the Shrouded Sky.
