Ask RPS: What will the next 150 years of PC gaming hold?

MiniMatt Asks RPS

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In addition to resolutions , new years are always good times to start thinking about the futureeeee , with or without a wibbly oooOOOoooOoooOh intonation. Predictions about what’s going to happen over the next 12 months abound, some of which are more spurious (and light-hearted) than others . But such near-sightedness is not what we’re concerning ourselves with today in this latest edition of Ask RPS . We’re looking much further ahead, thanks to this excellent question from MiniMatt.

They ask: “Dearest RPS, This being your 150th year in PC gaming [ Ed: this question was submitted in 2023 ] , please tell us what the next 150 years hold? Will VR become universal? Will the desktop PC box survive or will we all move over to laptops & steam decks? Will industry continue to consolidate or fragment? Get yer nostradamus on and tell us Peter Molyneux’s future.

Indeed, a lot has changed in the world of PC gaming since our esteemed founding in 1873, so come and find out our best guesses for what the future holds below.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/PlayStation PC LLC

Katharine: Assuming the world doesn’t either flood, freeze or boil over and the human race is still a going concern in 150 years time, I predict that desktop PCs will be a thing of the past. Gabe’s neural computers will be implanted directly into our brains, and we’ll be able to tap the back of our ear to switch between different fields of vision, like channels on a TV. Games (and by extension our Steam library) will live on one of those channels and they’ll be beamed directly onto our corneas so they’re fully immersive - no more monitors and refresh rates to worry about in this vision of the future, no sir. Gamepads will probably hang in there as physical input devices, much like how we’ll continue to crave physical books and the like for our leisure time, but keyboards and mice will be mostly virtual, only appearing in front of us when the relevant computer channel of our brains is active.

Due to the success of their neural computers, Valve will naturally emerge as the mega purveyor of all video games, consuming both Microsoft and Sony in their wake, and becoming the all-consuming face of games (all while Nintendo continues to do their own weird thing much to everyone’s surprise and delight). They won’t own any actual studios, though - all game makers will exist independently in their own right, with shareholders having been banned worldwide across all forms of business over 50 years ago.

Jeremy: In 150 years, I reckon the desktop PC will survive, but it’ll look a lot different than what we have now. Probably something smaller or maybe even foldable. (If I hadn’t met my wife and switched over to iPhone in order to join the family iMessage chat, I’d probably have a folding Samsung phone by now!). Laptops and Steam Decks will still be around but even teenier and thinner than they are now. And I guess VR might be as pivotal to a computer setup as a mouse and gamepad is today, assuming that they manage to figure out motion sickness stuff for people like me who can’t wear a headset without wanting to hurl .

The industry will be more consolidated in the sense that consoles will probably be irrelevant (or just physical extensions of stuff on cloud-based servers) and everything will be on PC within a reasonable amount of time, which honestly already is the present we’re living in, aside from Bloodborne . Oh, and Nintendo, who will always be doing their own thing and probably will still refuse to release Mother 3 even in 2173.

Just to spite PC players, Bloodborne remains a PS4 exclusive forever. |Image credit:Sony Computer Entertainment

Ollie: 150 years is a long time. In 150 years, the video game medium will be older than the electrical telegraph is now. Others here have made good predictions around what kind of hardware will be used for games in the year 2174, so I’ll focus instead on the games themselves. And I think traditional game development will be more or less a thing of the past. AI will be powerful and sophisticated enough in 2174 that multiple megacorporations will be vying to create the first true metaverse, where you can interface with an AI and tell it in plain English what kind of game you’d like to play for this session, and it will create that game for you in moments.

First attempts will be janky and very limited, of course, but the potential will grip the imagination of the world, until something does arrive that creates the true experience. You could create games just with your words, and then share them with the world so you can play with your friends and family. Players could also create local versions of an existing game where they ask their AI to change certain aspects of it, increasing or decreasing the difficulty, adding new quests and UI elements and even whole expansions without any specialist knowledge.

James: Games will not exist as such, with each new release instead taking the form of a limited time event in Fortnite . VR hardware will improve enormously, yet never really takes off, as people think it makes you look like a berk in any century. Desktop designs endure with more RGB than ever, the Black Box rebels’ campaign of unlit resistance having been crushed to a man by a coalition of Asus and Logitech mercenaries. Those lost in the battle are later commemorated in a touching digital tribute, also in Fortnite. Nvidia release the RTX 790080, which is pretty good but costs too much.

For James, everything will only ever exist inside Fortnite from now on… |Image credit:Epic Games

Kiera: The Elder Scrolls 6 has finally released. It has middling reviews.

Alice Bee: My fellow Treehouse denizens have largely given jokey answers and I assume that’s for a very good reason: who knows? The very first bit of motion photography, the first example of film , was less than 150 years ago. That is bananas . Video games were invented in the 50s. Stuff changes a whole lot in relatively short spaces of time. So I reckon in 150 years, video games, and in particular desktop PCs, will be like records (also invented within 150 years). Sort of obsolete but cool collectors’ items, relegated to special shops for people with special interests, where tall men are allowed to smoke indoors and stand around using wired technology. If you enter one of these shops you will feel instantly unwelcome. The larger games industry will have collapsed like a dying star. The dominant form of entertainment will be something that we can recognise as sharing some common DNA with video games, but will be entirely its own thing that defies our imagination. And/or climate apocalypse.

Ed: Most of the population (they are the only microbes who can survive boiling point) play AI-generated games on TikTok. They do so by banding together in their thousands, forming a body, and swiping on a JBC Tough Phone that’s sunk to the bottom of the ocean. TikTok is run by a guy who lives inside a fridge, which proves handy for cooling his implants and keeping his double cream in date. The most popular game is Grand Theft Auto 7, Rockstar’s latest release. One Piece continues at full pelt and no one understands how. Keyboards adopted the honeycomb design, so the keycaps had holes and you pressed directly on the switch but sometimes got your fingers stuck. People hated those keyboards.

Do we even dare contemplate what GTA 7’s version ofGTA 6’s social media networkwill be?Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Rockstar Games

Alice0: Meet Abigail Warner, a professional 3D character artist in the year 2147. Her job is to make Mass Effect ’s Thane Krios. Her job is to make only Thane Krios. Her job is to always make Thane Krios.

In the mid-21st century, the industry’s shift towards live service games and endless remasters and remakes brought an inevitable merge. The only big-budget games remaining are remakes of ancient games. These have existed for over a century in a perpetual state of being remade. So when Abigail finishes making Thane, the model goes live in the game and she starts a new Thane. Each subsequent Thane has marginally higher polygon and texture budgets to suit marginally newer hardware. This week, she decides, it is finally time to bump the polycount of each tooth on his vest’s zip from 7000 polygons to 7300.

Abigail is a third-generation Thanesmith. Publishers turned development jobs into inherited roles because it builds generational expertise while avoiding the time and expense of application processes. People are just grateful for a job. Children are expected to study at a parent’s side until they reach the legal working age of 7, at which point they become an apprentice. They will largely assist through chores like placing pores, formatting code, restarting crashed test scripts, or recording impact sounds, then assume the family role upon their parent’s burnout-related death. The assassin Krios killed Abigail’s father, and his mother before him.

Everyone Abigail meets is excited when they learn of her job. She found it funny, at first. Yes, she makes the lizard man people are horny for. She resents him. Sometimes, she takes this anger out on Thane with tiny tweaks. A slightly unflattering jacket cut on one Thane. A dullness to the eyes of another. Tiny acts of rebellion proving to herself that she is still alive. Abigail once spent 37 Thanes progressively raising one eyebrow (a drift slow enough for plausible deniability) to make the beast look foolishly quizzical. She only began migrating the brow back to its original position after an attentive fan launched a campaign which flooded her home with over 73,000 microtransaction death threats. Many of today’s games sell sanctioned death threats targeting individual developers because publishers realised rage was an untapped font of fan engagement. Abigail takes some comfort in knowing Thane’s fictional fate.

Abigail glances at the son brewing in a genepod on her desk. His tutelage will soon begin. For the family to survive, he must come to know that loathsome lizard’s face better than her own.

Edwin:

Image credit:Sega/Scrooge

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

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