People online seem tired of crossover skins and silly cosmetics in games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. And now one of the lead devs behind online shooter Arc Raiders has promised that you won’t see Santa Claus or dinosaur outfits in the newly released live-service game.
The latest big hit on Steam is multiplayer extraction shooter Arc Raiders. It launched on October 30 on consoles and PC and quickly racked up over 200k concurrent players on Steam. And being an online game in 2025 means offering up cosmetics for players to earn or purchase. Arc Raiders is no exception, selling players skins if they so desire. But this year has also marked a turning point online in regard to in-game cosmetics. Players seem less willing to put up with silly crossover skins and goofy cosmetics. This has led to a whole ongoing skin saga involving Battlefield 6, which has promised not to include those kinds of items, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which arguably started the backlash we are seeing and has backpedaled on allowing silly skins from BLOPS6 to move forward into the upcoming FPS. And now the design director for Arc Raiders has weighed in on the topic and claimed the team is “protective” of the shooter’s visual identity.
“What I believe to be true is that we will maintain the current aesthetic that we have,” Arc Raiders design director Virgil Watkins told PCgamesN when asked about silly skins. “[Cosmetics] will fit within our sensibilities of how these things look and fit within the world and inside the fiction.” And while the devs and artists at Embark want to provide players with “as much freedom as possible” to express themselves, there are limits.
“I think it was said a little while ago in a meeting [that] we would never, say, make a Santa Claus outfit,” explained Watkins.
“But we may make something that is of our own tone and our own aesthetic that evokes Santa Claus. That’s not even a statement that we will have a Santa Claus outfit, but I think that’s kind of the line you can draw. We’re pretty protective of making sure that anything that goes into the game fits within the visual identity, fits within the tone, fits within the setting. I think because so much of our game is strong around that element, it would be really unfortunate to upset that by injecting, I don’t know, a T-Rex costume running around suddenly – I don’t think the novelty is worth the trade.”
Watkins’ answer highlights the problem of trying to walk the line between not disrupting your game’s visual identity while also still offering skins people are willing to buy. This is a problem Battlefield 6 is facing right now as it enters its first season. While many of the skins added to the game in the recent update look pretty realistic to me, many other players online are furious about all the colors. One skin even had its neon green toned down after players complained enough. While that might be seen as a victory for some, it leads to a strange situation where other players might not want to buy the game’s battle pass or spend money on new skins because they’re too boring or plain.
Threading that needle is proving tricky for EA, will likely be challenging for Black Ops 7, and I suspect it will be a problem for Arc Raiders, too. All it takes is one skin to be a bit too silly or colorful, and suddenly, the community might turn on you and use your own words against you. Good luck to all devs working on live-service games in 2025. It sounds like a nightmare.
