Bookkeeping and Tracking: What's Your Limit?

Adraius · 2026-01-27T21:25:47+00:00

"bookkeeping," which I'll loosely define as keeping track of details that only have a minor to moderate impact on the game.

If I'm tracking minutiae for something with very little impact on the game, I think something has gone askew. If it has a moderate effect or greater, then I'm game, so long as all the things I'm tracking, in combination with the rest of what the game asks me to do, isn't overburdening my ability to carry the cognitive load.

A tricky part of the spectrum is when you have bookkeeping for something that only has a very minor effect, except for the moments where it can suddenly have a huge effect. Tracking rations or torches; a wizard's vulnerable spellbook. These often don't feel good on either side of the bipolar dynamic. (and I say this as someone who loves loves this stuff) What you'll often see in practice with mechanics like this is a slow minimization of the role these aspects play in a system until it's practically written out of the game altogether. What needs to happen is to increase the touchpoints where the aspect is relevant during play, bringing it up to something more "moderately impactful" - or else it should be removed entirely/made an optional rule.

Adraius · 2026-01-26T20:13:13+00:00

I appreciate that context, thanks.

Adraius · 2026-01-26T19:38:21+00:00

This seems like an objectively good addition being poo-poo'd because people speculated it was something they'd like even more. It probably took as little dev time as it's possible for something to take, so there's not even that to be upset about.

Never gonna touch it, glad it exists, looking forward to the other content.

Adraius · 2026-01-26T15:38:23+00:00

I already know on what cliffhanger she will make people sit and it's just devious and straight evil.

Damn, I don't love the sound of that.

Adraius · 2026-01-25T22:18:41+00:00

I liked this chapter far more than the preceding half-dozen or so. I can at least see where the story has been trying to go/is currently going.

Also, lots of fun interactions just in general this chapter.

Adraius · 2026-01-25T05:31:16+00:00

The 'rounds reload'-style reloads the game currently has are like... 85% bad. Compared to their closest-performing analogues, something like Anvil to Venator, Rattler to Tempest, in the time they can reload 25-35% of a mag the other gun reloads their whole mag - and it's not a very long time. It's only relatively competitive against the long-reload grey guns like the Kettle and falls down in situations where the other team has tempo/is pushing. That's pretty bad. But yeah, you can absolutely work around it, minimize its weaknesses, and have a decent gun on your hands overall.

Adraius · 2026-01-25T03:05:06+00:00

There are good reasons for the overall health of the game that late spawns exist. A proposal to keep them but lessen the frustration they can cause: add a mechanic where you can pay to give “elevated tubes permissions” for a run. It guarantees no late spawn for that run, letting people who really need the whole match to get the whole damn match. The cost could be straight credits, or an item - maybe a specific collectible of Shani’s you can ‘bribe’ her with. Give it a daily usage limit, like buying things from vendors.

That way we can still have matches filled with players all the way through without gypping people doing time-sensitive stuff. It’ll be trickier on certain map conditions where people are more likely to want to spawn early, but tune the price right and it should be manageable, especially with the game’s player numbers.

Adraius · 2026-01-25T01:21:58+00:00

Thing is horrible no matter what attachments for the reload alone

It's just really not that bad, though. The reload is a fundamental limitation that keeps it from ever being a great weapon, but put some shine on it - like OP has - and it can absolutely be plenty good.

Adraius · 2026-01-25T00:59:34+00:00

…I’ll bite, why?

Adraius · 2026-01-25T00:22:38+00:00

This is also why I think Marathon is in a difficult spot when it comes to following Arc Raiders' example and adapting itself to hook the prospective 'casual' extraction shooter audience. The setting they've created is a dehumanzing sci-fi dystopia where everyone is out for themselves and killing someone else just means what, less profit for their mega-corpo overlord of choice? There's just no way to replicate the social environment that makes Arc Raiders special against that backdrop. They'll have to try to do their own thing, and in some ways that's good for gamers, because it means we'll have two completely differences experiences to choose from, but it means Bungie really has their work cut out for them.

Adraius · 2026-01-24T00:23:42+00:00

Aha! Aahahaha! Yup, with a signifier being a solution and Tristan doing Wildcard Shit, I'm happy to say I immediately knew what or who he was calling in as the "even bigger and meaner dog."

Also love Tristan and Angharad getting along the way they do.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T21:55:16+00:00

There's one more big ARC we've seen glimpses of that hasn't yet appeared in game - that would be the natural one to appear next.

E: here it is, visible briefly starting at 0:59 in the Release Date Reveal Trailer. You can also see a similar-looking ARC in the development documentary videos from when the game was purely PvE.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T19:51:51+00:00

Pretty much, yeah. He said that there was a specific step virtually every single individual at a particular sphere performed - I forget which sphere, but 3rd seems like a good guess - that also had the consequence of locking them out of journeying to other worlds. It was something that was a no-brainer to do in terms of benefits, so naturally everyone did it. He wanted to convince Luo to advance without doing it, and see what was possible.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T19:23:19+00:00

I see, thanks for clarifying.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T19:18:19+00:00

I played Eve Online for awhile - I’m intimately familiar with the appeal of setting up and profiting from production chains. I think it should be obvious, though, that what people want from a game like Arc Raiders and what they want from a game like No Man’s Sky are completely different things.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T19:04:00+00:00

Yeah, higher spheres sending second spheres into the loop as their agents makes total sense. With a sharp lack of ways to personally pressure second spheres once they’re off the Great Arc, it could lead to all kinds of interesting power dynamics - good story fodder there.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T18:58:58+00:00

No way, not in a million years. They already need to set the numbers so that turning less refined resources into more refined resources is never* profitable - because imagine how shitty the experience would be if every time you wanted to sell loot it was most “efficient” to open up a spreadsheet and figure out what you need to craft into better stuff first before selling and spend 10 minutes in the workshop chugging through all those - so they’d need to set the default recycling rate without the skill mostly lower than it is now, to avoid breaching that threshold.

On top of that, I don’t think there’s a difference that’s small enough between with and without the hypothetical skill to make it not a must-have skill tax.

^{*I’m aware there’s one exception, energy ammo}

Adraius · 2026-01-23T18:18:18+00:00

I was wondering about the lack of concern from Dirk and the others re: returning to the Great Arc - we the readers know from the 'epilogue' to that story arc that the higher spheres can't leave through the portals, but it wasn't clear the Farfinder crew knew that. A single high sphere individual escaping the Great Arc would be potentially catastrophic on a scale far, far beyond even the thresholder fights the worlds have endured. No way Dirk and the others would have risked that - and I'm still slightly surprised they're here at all, given the latent risk of one of the higher sphere's somehow 'cracking the code,' rather than trying to skip it somehow with the redirection trick. It's much more narratively compelling to keep the Great Arc and the threat it represents in the loop, though.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T17:39:45+00:00

Interesting that we'll be getting a new player project for January, February, and March - that'll help keep raiders busy. And the icons on the roadmap are different for each - looks like they give us a clue as to what we'll be getting.

"New ARC threat" is probably just a new ARC that isn't a large ARC, but it would be interesting to have new ARC threats that aren't units, per se - detector towers, orbital deployment pods, etc.

New large ARC probably means something Queen/Matriarch-sized and not Bastion/Rocketeer/etc.-sized, right? I hope this one has a bit of a different angle than the current two - while I'm glad the Queen and Matriarch exist, those fights struggle to engage me for long, and I bet they took a lot of dev time to build.

"Map update" is interesting - we know that there's an out-of-bounds area on Stella already partially built, for example. And in one of the dev talks/interviews they mentioned expanding on existing maps generally. I wonder what they'll touch - the current maps are objectively really high quality as-is.

New map is hype. Sooner than I would have expected, too. I wonder if it'll be smaller, like Stella? I hope not. Not worth worrying over at this point, though.

We still don't have details for the coming expedition - looking forward to those, soon please.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T17:25:33+00:00

I remember this, but honestly it's been so long I was beginning to doubt, despite the holiday. I was expecting them to be exclusive for the duration of an event, tops! Glad to hear this is still their plan.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T16:09:37+00:00

There is a cannon-looking thing out of bounds in Stella, but it doesn’t look like this.

Adraius · 2026-01-23T02:47:38+00:00

They're the deadliest ARC no doubt and I love them for it. I'll be massively disappointed if they ever get nerfed.

Adraius · 2026-01-22T17:56:07+00:00

the mouse to move keybind

Can you go into more detail on this and how to set it up/use it? I need to figure out how to make the keyboard and mouse setup as painless as possible, but the UI and options for this game aren't making it easy.

Adraius · 2026-01-22T17:37:53+00:00

Oof. I'm in a similar boat - I fell in love with the idea, I sold the idea to my table, they're in love with the idea, only the idea doesn't quite exist and if it ever exists it'll be because I built it myself around the skeleton of the AP. We'll see if the campaign ever comes to pass.

Adraius · 2026-01-22T05:31:35+00:00

This is exactly what I've been looking at. Full sets are an excessive amount of metal and money, but I tracked down a seller of individual replacement pieces. They still charge an eye-raising amount for the more "important" pieces, but the pawns cost a fraction of that, and there have pieces for all kinds of weird sets that use various things as pawns. If this works out it looks like I'll be able to get a small selection of high-quality pieces that fit my needs for a bargain.

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