Gage Allen, who describes himself as a "professional game trailer director," brings his cinematic style to Arc Raiders in a new short film stitched together from gameplay footage featuring narration from a range of actors including the likes of Game of Thrones' Edward Dogliani (Rattleshirt in Seasons 2 and 3) and Hades' Avalon Penrose (Megaera)
"THIS IS ARC RAIDERS," a 10-minute film uploaded on February 20 (the last two minutes are credits), is already the third-most popular video on Allen's YouTube channel, Player One Stories, at 140,000 views at the time of writing. Player One Stories is best known for a Battlefield short film from 2019.
"I am a professional game trailer director behind games like Pacific Drive, BG3, Stellaris, Path of Titans, and many others," Allen writes in a Reddit post. "I got a lot of requests to make something for Arc Raiders, and the more I started to try the game out the more I saw a film form in my head.
"I wanted to tell an original story using a mix of scripted moments with in-game actors and spontaneous moments with random players unaware they were being filmed, all done entirely without dev tools or camera tools. All gameplay capture, editing, writing, VO, and sound mixing is original and created just for this film. Some custom sound design was done for this as well. If you played Arc Raiders anytime between January and February, you may be in this."
The viewer response has been enormously positive, with one YouTube top comment suggesting, "If Embark doesn't have you on their payroll yet, they need to change that asap."
Arc Raiders players also look impressed in the replies to Allen's Reddit post sharing the film. "I've seen some super cool in-game camera work but this takes the cake," one user says. "I don't even understand how you got some of these shots, it's so cinematic for gameplay."
The film is nicely framed in its riff on Arc Raiders' themes and lore, including the emergence and evolution of the Arc, tensions among survivors, and fights between Raiders driven by scarcity or simple bloodthirst. Rich narration and some lovely panning shots that leverage the game's fantastic environments do a pretty good job injecting meaning and history into the narrative of a game that's only a few months old and has, thus far, been pretty light and loose with its own storytelling.
"Every day, less return," one narrator says. "Those that do bring stories of an enemy that is burning our home and devouring its people, leaving nothing behind. Yet humans are stubborn. So we crawled underground like roaches, biding our time. Waiting for the light once more."
