28 November 2025

“It’s a Game About Listening for Things” And Yet ARC Raiders Is Excluded From One Game Award

By newsgame

Most who have spent a significant amount of time playing ARC Raiders should know by now that it is a game that is just as much about listening as it is about seeing. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that if someone wants to succeed in ARC Raiders, they should probably play it with a gaming headset on that will allow them to hear more clearly. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has played a competitive shooter before, but in ARC Raiders, players have more than just other Raiders to worry about. ARCs relentlessly patrol the surface in search of humans to subdue, and hearing them can be the difference between life or death. More than any PvP shooter, that makes the ability to hear everything of the utmost importance.

This ultimately comes down to how ARC Raiders was designed—with audio at the forefront. According to the developers, ARC Raiders is “a game about listening for things,” which is something not every shooter can claim. Embark’s extraction shooter already has impeccable visuals, but its sound design is top-notch, offering players an immersive experience unlike many others. However, despite this being a core part of ARC Raiders‘ design philosophy, it wasn’t nominated for the Game Award that some players anticipated would be an easy win.

ARC Raiders Wasn’t Always About Listening for Things

As is the case with almost any game, ARC Raiders evolved drastically throughout its development. What the game is today is a far cry from what it was originally conceived to be. For example, Embark initially planned for the extraction shooter to be a PvE experience, as detailed in the first episode of The Evolution of ARC Raiders docuseries posted on the official ARC Raiders YouTube channel. That’s not the only thing the developer changed, though, as its pace was significantly altered as well, with its emphasis on audio design filling a more prominent role as a result.

ARC Raiders’ Emphasis on Audio Was Due to a Change of Pace

It actually wasn’t the developers deciding they wanted ARC Raiders‘ audio to be a core part of the experience that made it such, but a decision to slow down the pace of the game to the point that players would have no choice but to listen closely to their surroundings rather than react to them. As audio director Bence Pajor stated during the first episode of The Evolution of ARC Raiders, “The game we’re making now was the game I sort of imagined when we started building it. It was a game about exploring and being in this world, and the world was supposed to challenge you, and you were supposed to go places to find things. The way the game was playing earlier was this action game where things just came at you.”

Of course, “things” do still come at players in ARC Raiders in its current version, with the machines in the world pulling out all the stops to track down and defeat any players they spot out in the open. However, there’s no denying the fact that the extraction shooter fans are playing today forces them into slower pacing than an “action game,” as Pajor calls it, might have. Originally pitched as something closer to Shadow of the Colossus meets Left 4 Dead meets PUBG, ARC Raiders‘ game loop was once vague and heavy on action. Over time, the pace slowed, environments grew larger, and the decision was made to highlight audio as the core of the experience. As Pajor stated,

“To me, it’s much better because it has a slower pace. This is the best game I’ve worked on, for me, because it’s a game about listening for things.”

As the audio director said, ARC Raiders was meant to challenge players not just visually but audibly, forcing them to listen in order to survive. Today, the extraction shooter is not about fast snaps and quick swaps but about strategic planning, careful decision-making, and an extreme amount of environmental awareness, all of which are deeply rooted in its audio design. And yet, ARC Raiders was excluded from the list of games nominated for Best Audio Design at this year’s Game Awards.

ARC Raiders Can’t Win Best Audio Design at the 2025 Game Awards

While there have been plenty of heated discussions surrounding whether ARC Raiders should have been nominated for Game of the Year, a less controversial take seems to be that it should have been nominated for Best Audio Design, at the very least. It was nominated for Best Multiplayer Game, alongside the likes of Battlefield 6 and Elden Ring Nightreign, but it was snubbed for the award that would have highlighted one of its most prioritized and praised characteristics.

Here are the nominees for Best Audio Design in the 2025 Game Awards:

Battlefield 6 (Battlefield Studios/EA)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive)
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Ghost of Yotei (Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment)
Silent Hill f (NeoBards Entertainment/KONAMI)

ARC Raiders‘ audio design is good because it was treated so well during development. Embark’s goal during the game’s development didn’t seem to be merely polishing sound effects at the end of it all, but building the entire game around them. Every ARC Wasp overhead, every explosion from a Rocketeer’s missiles in the distance, and even the wind blowing through the trees is there to tell players everything they need to know about what is happening around them. ARC Raiders whole gameplay loop relies on how effectively its audio crafts context, so it had to be good.

That’s why its absence from the Best Audio Design nominations feels so strange, because few games lean on their audio as heavily or rely on it as directly as ARC Raiders does. Since the game’s launch, the consensus among players has even been that the extraction shooter has impeccable sound design, with Reddit posts like this one from user KawiWarrior inviting players to pay their respects. Other Reddit posts, like one from user ThrowghAway74, express a similar sentiment, with comments from fans calling ARC Raiders‘ Audio Design “incredible,” “too good,” and “out of this world.”

ARC Raiders earned its reputation as a game built around listening, not because of a marketing line, but because its entire identity grew out of a shift toward slower pacing and a world that pushes players to pay attention to every sound it makes. That evolution turned its audio into the backbone of the experience, influencing how players move, how they plan, and how they survive. With that in mind, its absence from the Best Audio Design category stands out, because few games this year built their core loop around sound as deliberately as ARC Raiders. Even if the awards overlooked it, though, the reality is that players know what the game achieved, and the community has been recognizing its audio work since launch.