Dark Arc

Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

  • 101 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah for me, it’s the variety of tales that you author. Every game feels a bit like a new adventure, after a while similar to ones you’ve been on before, but still new.

    ARC has those elements, but something feels off so far for me…

    Also typically the progression is in terms of variety (Roguelike) instead of straight power (Roguelite). That keeps things fair because even a new player, if they trade the aim, can pose a real threat to a seasoned player of similar FPS skill. ARC seems like it’s decided to go for a sort of Roguelite experience and that seems risky.


  • I haven’t played Marathon, but I did get into the ARC test. This will mostly be some ramblings…

    I’m still waiting to play ARC with some friends. I only did some solo stuff.

    I’m coming from this as a big Hunt Showdown player (1,200+ hours) and someone that’s played a bit of Forever Winter (~20). I still like Hunt better; I think it’s the only extraction shooter that didn’t take a ton of influence from Tarkov.

    I wasn’t crazy about the marathon art style, but I’m not ready to pass judgement on it until I’ve been in the world.

    ARC’s art style I found beautiful but also perhaps too sparse. There were so many wide open spaces … I just don’t see that being a good thing for an extraction shooter. The world felt vast and empty … I prefer Hunt’s more cluttered and dense design.

    ARC does seem to have a lot of potential in like how it’s designed its AI, Hunt’s is very primitive in a lot of ways and kind of secondary. I think the AI is going to be a bigger deal in ARC.

    Third person also feels worse to me than first person. I hope they add a first person mode to ARC, but I kind of doubt they will.

    I definitely agree that ARC felt like it was being set up to tell a story and felt very cinematic at times.

    The UI also felt like the best extraction shooter UI I’ve ever encountered.

    I’m concerned about the long term health of ARC. The progression system seems like it will certainly lead to established players dominating newer players. The lack of a primary objective that’s shared by all the teams on the map … I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it may lead to a more relaxed experience, on the other hand, it doesn’t curate players towards each other like Hunt does; it seems looting and crafting are the primary motivators instead.

    The fights that I did get into, they lacked the complex environment and buildings in Hunt so I didn’t find them nearly as engaging, they were much more straight forward gunfights than leveraging the map to use it to my advantage. I think that aspect will ultimately hurt the game as it makes it feel like a bit of a generic shooter.

    Overall ARC felt very middle of the road from what I’ve played of it so far. I had a similar feeling about The Finals. Embark seems like a talented studio and I wish them the best as they go up against Bungie and Crytek.










  • Hm… I’ll admit I wasn’t awkward of the .__len__ function. However, does this mean it’s possible to write a len(x) == 0 that’s diverges from not x?

    If not, then the substitution is still valid (and not presumably also considers the same fundamental. If so, that’s kind of silly.

    EDIT: I missed the part of your comment about .__bool__ … so yeah in theory you could have something where these two operations are not equivalent.

    Arguably, you could just say that’s pathological and invalid. Then, still have an optimized path to prefer not .__bool__() if .__len__() == 0 is the comparison you’d be making. Even with the extra interpreter check during evaluation, that would quite possibly be faster if the overhead is truly high.

    EDIT 2: you’d probably need a little bit more overhead than a straight substitution anyways because you need to maintain the semantic of “if this thing is None it’s not valid if the syntax was originally len(x).”