It seems like the following is indeed interesting, yet I’ve never ever experienced Arc Raiders myself! Have you? ^^
But often, players are just talking. A YouTube video called The Humans of Arc Raiders, inspired by the photographer who interviews strangers in New York City, includes conversations with randomly encountered players. They talk about family struggles, work lives, depression, autism and, in one case, a lung collapse. In one conversation, a heavily armed player in green armour named Poopy candidly asks another raider: "What’s it like having kids, dude?”
When I first jumped into Arc Raiders, I found a dichotomy on the topside, where birds sing and plants thrive among the carcasses of downed machines. The more I wandered around this 1970s-style retro-future setting, the more I bumped into other humans, many of whom offered help, such as medical supplies. Mostly we snuck around and battled robots together. It was tense at times, sometimes scary, but often relaxing.
In one session, I encountered another player with a British accent who was also new to the game. "Have you been killed by another person yet?” he asked me, as we explored a burst concrete dam complex. "Because every person I’ve met has been friendly,” he added. “No one kills each other.”
Source [web-archive]
Honestly Arc Raiders is (or can be) more about collecting stuff while staying alive than about killing stuff. Evading 100% of the fights is a totally valid play style. So your vision problems might not be as big a deal in this game as you would expect.
Other guy: “Grab the supplies”
Me: “Where are they?”
Other guy: “Over there”
Me: “Where is ‘there’?”
I know next to nothing about Arc Raiders, so I may be assuming wrong. It’s not just about PvP, it’s about how fast-paced the game play is. I can bumble through a game of Deep Rock Galactic with friends because it’s (I imagine) slower paced and everyone is working on the same goal. My friends are also patient enough to deal with my issues.
If you buy ARC Raiders, you’ll have your money’s worth by the time you decide whether you’re enjoying it.
You can easily avoid PVP most of the time by not engaging in combat with other players - the game will put you into like-minded lobbies in a few raids.
ARC is often fairly big and has multiple ways to destroy, as well as multiple points to damage them, with some weapons definitely being easier to use, let alone the grenades. On top of non-combat ways of dealing with them.
And most importantly, the people. You can just join raids solo and run up to people and team up to go do whatever together. You can get helped on most, if not all, things that you might wanna do, but struggle with due to your vision.
And even if you don’t, you’ll love the game for what your vision won’t affect: the chatting and the community and the cool shit you all do.
I’d say go watch some specifically friendly videos, but they just do such lobbies justice.
Deep Rock with friends is indeed a very awesome game!
I have no idea how bad your vision is, you do need decent situational awareness in Arc Raiders to stay alive. And you need to get to an exit point before the mission is over (15 minutes I think? Been a while since I last played it). But other than that you can solo in your own tempo, tagging along with others is completely optional.