I took someone else’s recommendation here and picked it up last week. As an old, solo player I’ve been killed by players twice out of 30ish games.

Most all the solo players I’ve met are friendly and offering help on voice chat.

It ain’t Tarkov. You should try it.

I usually avoid PvP games and I didn’t like ARC Raiders at first, but it has grown on me.

Unless you use the starter kit, you’ll always have at least one safe pocket slot, allowing you to bring back at least one item (or a stack) even if you get knocked out. Moreover, so often my stash is full even after multiple expansions, so the game encourages using those resources to craft weapons, which again makes it less of a problem if you get knocked out.

Later quests are not easily completed, but you can focus on completing the daily tasks for battle pass progression. There will be simple tasks like having to open containers or doing damage to the ARC robots, so you can just go out with the stater kit and do those, not worrying about losing your loot. With that mentality, at least sometimes (though often in my case playing solo), you’ll extract and get a lot of loot on top of your XP and tasks progression.

Which is a bit ironic given the story of the game is that AI has taken over the (surface) world.

Even more worrying that it’s not disclosed in Steam’s AI usage section on their store page:

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.