This Reddit Post Suggests Arc Raiders on PS5 Is Just a Murder-Sim, and on PC It's... Kinda Nice?
A small, unscientific Reddit post just revealed a massive "trust gap" between platforms, and I'm totally obsessed with the "why."
I love the internet. Some people get pissed off and write a "git gud" post. Other people, like these two brothers on the Arc Raiders subreddit, conduct a whole-ass sociological experiment.
The setup was simple. Two brothers. One on PC, one on PS5. They both turned off crossplay for a full week and meticulously logged every single player encounter.
The result? A set of numbers that paints an absolutely brutal picture. It confirms what many of us have long suspected: the console ecosystem is, by and large, a pit of vipers.
The Bloody Numbers
Let's just look at the data, because it's stark.
The PC player met 172 other people. About 67% of his encounters were neutral-to-positive ("wishing him luck" or "extracted together"). Only 33% were hostile. A pretty decent ratio for an extraction shooter.
The PS5 player? He met 237 people. Over 79% of his encounters were hostile. Seventy-nine percent.
We're talking 102 "shoot on sight" murders. 58 backstabbings after lying. And the most chilling stat of all: 28 "fake team-ups" that ended with a bullet to the head at the extraction point.
The PC player only got betrayed at extract three times.
The difference is staggering. On PC, you have a roughly 1-in-57 chance of being betrayed at the finish line. On PS5, it's worse than 1-in-10. So, what the hell is going on?
The 'Call of Duty' Voice Chat Hangover
My first thought was the keyboard, but that's wrong. You can't just type "I'm friendly." Your options are voice chat or the pre-set comms wheel. And that's where the real difference lies.
Let's be real: PC and console players grew up in two vastly different communication environments.
PC players, especially those of us who cut our teeth on Counter-Strike or DayZ, were raised on the idea that voice chat is a tool. It's for callouts, for coordination, for strategy. We're just more conditioned to use in-game voice to actually communicate. Saying "hey, friendly friendly" is a default setting for a lot of us.
The console world? For years, the default in-game voice experience was the 360-era Call of Duty lobby. A hellscape of screeching kids, open-mic background noise, and slurs.
What did this teach an entire generation of console players? It taught them that the first thing you do in any multiplayer game is mute everyone. Or, even simpler, you just sit in a private PSN party chat with your friends, permanently cut off from the rest of the lobby.
If your default state is "silence," you can't negotiate. You can't de-escalate. You just shoot.
The Clunky Comms Wheel
"But what about the comms wheel?" I hear you ask. Arc Raiders has a "Don't Shoot" voice line, right?
Sure. But using it is a massive gamble.
On PC, I've got that shit bound to a key. I can hit it instantly without taking my fingers off my movement keys.
On a controller, you have to stop, hold a button, and carefully aim your analog stick at the right slice of the pie. That's a solid 1-2 second window where you are a sitting duck, not aiming, and not shooting.
In a tense standoff, who's going to win? The guy who immediately starts shooting, or the guy fumbling with his D-pad to say "I'm a friend!"?
It's just mechanically safer to shoot first and never even try to be friendly.
The 'DMZ' Training Program
This all feeds into the other big factor: the Call of Duty effect.
The biggest, most mainstream "extraction" experience on console for years has been DMZ. And what's the number one rule of DMZ? Trust no one.
The entire "assimilation" and "plea for help" system is a social experiment in treachery. The console player base has been trained to expect betrayal. They've been taught that a "friendly" player is just a sucker you haven't killed yet, or a killer who hasn't killed you yet.
When you combine a "shoot first" culture (from DMZ) with a "talk never" culture (from toxic old lobbies), you get the stats from that Reddit post. You get an ecosystem of pure, unadulterated paranoia.
The Vicious Cycle
The original poster said it best. His brother on PS5 "felt he needed to shift his play style to be more silent and not trust anyone."
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The environment is hostile, so you become hostile to survive. This, in turn, new player you meet.
It’s a feedback loop of pure paranoia. The PS5-only lobby is a digital Hobbesian state of nature: a "war of all against all."
I'm with the user who brought this up. I'm a PC-only guy, and I'm perfectly happy keeping crossplay on. The chaos is half the fun, and playing with my "console brothers" is always a good time, even if they're trying to murder me.
But this data is fascinating. It's a tiny little window into how the boxes we play on, and the cultures they created, can fundamentally change how we play. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get betrayed at extract. For science.
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