Arc Raiders design director says players 'never worked together' in testing, but the emergence of care bear lobbies 'encourages us to lean toward giving opportunities to have friendly interactions'

Arc Raiders Trophy Display: Key art showing three characters. The one on the left is wearing a blue pincho and holding a pistol ready at their hip. The middle figure is wearing a brown poncho and cowboy hat, facing the camera with a pistol across their chest. On the right is another character in a brown poncho and hat but facing away.

Arc Raiders is a fascinating social experiment, and also occasionally a videogame. Even as someone on the outskirts, I've sunk hours into watching social interactions play out between rats and good guys, chucked into a pressure cooker where you can kill each other, but are never forced to.

Speaking to PC Gamer's own Tim Clark, design director Virgil Watkins says that the presence of these peace-loving raiders was a surprise even to the development team: "It is not at all how it was working in our tests, either for ourselves or the previous tests. It was hyper, hyper aggressive in those tests, people never worked together."