Extraction shooters have a special way of making you feel like a millionaire right before they turn you into a cautionary tale. You spend most of your time on the map. Your bags are full. You’ve survived encounters you had no business walking away from, either by hugging a container until your heart stopped pounding or by winning a firefight by the narrowest of margins. Either way, you’re carrying more loot than you’ve ever extracted in a single run, and all that stands between you and payday is one exfil point.
You move cautiously and check your corners. You’re almost there. Then you stop because something moved behind that container. You’re sure of it. Or… were you? Maybe it was nothing. Maybe your nerves are just shot after looting everything you could find on the map. You shake it off and keep moving, and eventually reach the exfil, hit the button and wait for the countdown to finish and whisk you away. The loot is practically already yours.
Then the shooting starts. You fight back, of course you do, but it’s over fast. Outgunned, outnumbered, and dead on the ground, you watch your carefully collected haul become someone else’s payday. You become furious and frustrated and before you know it, you’re slamming your fist into your keyboard, the mouse meets the wall, and you sit there in the dark stewing.
What was it that Art3mis said to Parzival in Ready Player One? Oh, right… Careful not to lose your shit. Sure, that’s easier said than done.
My past few months have been a masterclass in that exact cycle, split between Arc Raiders and Marathon. Somewhere in all that dying, I had to learn something I genuinely did not want to accept, the loot was never really mine to begin with. You’re just borrowing it. Someone told me that once, and as much as I hated hearing it, they weren’t wrong.
For a lot of us, the fear of losing gear has a genuine grip on the way we play. I can’t count how many times I’ve sat at my loadout screen, paralyzed, debating whether to bring in that blue or purple weapon and risk losing it, or just roll in with a free kit and hope I can scavenge something useful or take it off whoever comes at me first. That fear holds me back, not just as a player but as a teammate. If I cheap out on my loadout to protect my stash, I’m not just gimping myself. I’m gimping whoever is running with me.
The ridiculous part is that none of it is real. It’s pixels. Virtual items I know I’ll find again eventually, and yet my brain refuses to process it that way. It feels real in the same way debating whether to bring a brand-new toy outside felt real as a kid. You knew what might happen. You knew some other kid might go home with it and nobody would ever speak of it again. So, you leave it at home, and you went outside with the old stuff. And then you wonder why you’re not having as much fun. It’s basically the same energy.
When it comes to extraction shooters, the developers have clearly built some psychology, some kind of mental programming into these games that makes us react differently than we would anywhere else. A good example for me is my love of Soulslikes. When I die in a Soulslike, it doesn’t really matter because I know I’ll respawn and try again. Sure, it stings at first, but I get over it. And yet with extraction shooters, that same logic should apply.
If I lose a weapon in Arc Raiders or Marathon, I know I’ll eventually get another one. I’ll find it, buy it, craft it, or loot it off someone else who was just as confident as I was a few minutes earlier. Somehow though, these games convince us that every item in our stash is sacred and irreplaceable. That we’ll build up an inventory of gear that we simply don’t want to take onto a run. Slowly, I’m starting to realize that mindset is part of the problem.
What I’ve been learning, often the hard way, is that losing gear in these games isn’t the end of the world. It feels like it in the moment, especially when you just spent 20 minutes creeping around a map collecting the best sack of goodies that you’ve ever had, only to lose it all five seconds before extraction. But in reality, it’s just a setback.
You go back to your stash. You rebuild, maybe even free kit up, then you queue up again. And more importantly, you learn something from it. Maybe you stayed on the map too long chasing one piece of loot. Maybe you ignored the signs that someone else was nearby. Maybe you engaged in a fight that you didn’t need to take, or maybe you just got unlucky and ran into a squad that was better positioned than you were. Maybe you started shooting that robot when you could have easily used a melee attack. Whatever the reason, the loss becomes part of the experience.
I’m still not completely over the fear of losing my gear, and I probably never will be. That little voice in the back of my head is always going to ask if bringing the good stuff into a run is really worth the risk. But I’m starting to understand something that took way too long to sink in. The gear isn’t the point.
The tension, the close calls, the firefights that leave you shaking afterward, and even the losses right at the exfil point are the things that make extraction shooters what they are. Without that risk, the victories wouldn’t feel nearly as good.
These days, when I lose a loadout that took hours to build, I still feel it. I still stare at the screen for a moment wondering what I could have done differently. Then I rebuild my kit, queue up again, and drop back into the map. Because if extraction shooters have taught me anything, it’s that the loot was never really mine and that the run is all that mattered.
I’ll see you online in either of these games, and if I do, just know that I don’t do the friendly thing anymore. If I see you, I’m shooting. Have fun, good luck!
