I just finished my Expedition project in Arc Raiders and, honestly, it wasn't worth it

I finally finished my Expedition project in Arc Raiders, "Now I can actually play the game" as I saw one Reddit-user aptly state. It was a pretty long process, considering I started it immediately at level 20 and now I'm level 33. It saw me desperately rummaging through apartments in Dam Battlegrounds praying for a Humidifier drop, farming Leapers with Wolfpack grenades, and searching high and low for Cooling Fans.

The surprise fifth and final stage practically emptied my 256 item vault to fulfil its conditions, dumping crafting mats, weapons, gadgets, and trinkets en masse into my Expedition pod to reach its value capacities. Disregarding the four previous stages, you need a grand total of $830,000 worth of various loot items, and that's a whole heap of stuff. And it doesn't even count towards the loot value at the end of the season that determines how many of the five bonus skill points you get on your next character.

For those that don't know, Expeditions are Arc Raiders' prestige system, letting you send your Raider into the wild green yonder past the Dust Belt and gain a variety of rewards on your subsequent character in return.

So, having done it, does the Expedition project seem worth it to me? Not really if I'm honest. Currently, the bonuses stated in the project you stand to gain are:

• Up to five bonus skill points based on stash value at the end of the season
• Increased XP gain
• A new character (meaning you can level skills differently)
• More stash space
• Extra Scrappy materials
• Increased weapon repairs (though it's unclear what this means)

First off, people are really over-exaggerating the importance of getting a respec right now. Like many, I put loads of points into mobility not realising that the skills don't work how they seem to and offer diminishing returns. Having actually played the game a bit now, I wish I'd specced into the Survival tree and got the Security Breach skill that opens those extra valuable loot crates you'll often find. But there's no reason you can't do both.

Arc Raiders has a level 75 skill cap, easily enough to unlock the top abilities in two separate trees, plus a few extra skills. There are also outfit unlocks all the way up to 75, meaning that if you reset before you hit that, you'll be retreading the same ground to get back there again. I've played 60 hours since launch and I'm level 33, so there's definitely plenty more time and XP to get the skills you want without needing a respec.

As for bonus XP gain and skill points, it's nice for sure, but levelling is already quite fast. It might be worth it if those skill points were bonus and let you push the level cap slightly, though that would be a bad precedent to set. I'm just uncertain if those things are valuable enough to warrant upending your stash and high-rarity gear into the Expedition project, especially with new Arcs and endgame regions opening up all the time right now, as with Stella Montis.

Similarly, the extra Scrappy rewards are nice, but I think the real kicker that needs to be addressed in regards to Expeditions is losing all your blueprints. Despite my high hour count, I've still only found 14 out of 74, and I've looted a lot of high value areas, but ultimately, acquiring them (and not duplicates of the same ones) is down to RNG. The idea of resetting blueprints, as if anyone is likely to find them all in a single season, is totally absurd. Especially when you also lose all your workbench upgrades anyway, i.e. the things you need to upgrade in order to actually craft these blueprints. I feel like we should either lose workbench upgrades or blueprints, but not both. Either that or give us the ability to keep a single blueprint of our choice.

Frankly, it'd also be a great incentive if the Expeditions offered some kind of unique cosmetic. Embark talked about that possibility in their initial blog post on Expedition projects, but since then it hasn't been mentioned, and I hope that the studio hasn't changed its mind. For me, that's the primary incentive for doing something like this.

Hopefully they'll reveal more info about the rewards in December when the Expedition departure window opens, but for now, I'd definitely suggest holding off rather than completing it early like I did. Honestly, it's early days and we still don't really know enough about Expedition projects to see whether they're truly worth it. For me, at least, I love the game so it's something I don't mind being a part of, but I do wish it felt like the return was going to be worth the considerable investment.