Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter. There's no doubt about that, right? Apparently, that fact wasn't obvious to developer Embark Studios when the game was early in development – or even several years into production. Different teams within the studio had different, contradictory ideas about what the game should be, and it was only after a dramatic shift in production that the game finally started to take shape.
"I started in 2020 at Embark, one year into production, and no one could answer me what the game was," according to production director Caio Braga, speaking at a Game Developer Conference panel attended by GamesRadar+. "Or everyone could, actually, but the answers are very different. You'd ask someone who would say it's a battle royale versus Arc, or it's a co-op Shadow of Colossus game, or a hero looter shooter."
Others would focus on how the game's all about "session-based raids." Still others thought it was "was a co-op Souls game – so a very difficult game against Arc." No one had a final answer. "For me? It was a boss fight race with obstacles," Braga explains. "You'd spawn, look at the map, know where the big boss would spawn, and you'd run like crazy towards the boss, because whoever killed the boss wins. Everyone else lost."
These weren't just contradictory views of the same game, either. Each faction within the dev team, which had around 120 people at that point, fought for its vision of Arc Raiders to take precedence. "We had a thing I called the playtest battles in the team. Every playtest would be playing one of those different games in a certain way," Braga explains.
"Our weapon team really wanted the weapons to feel amazing, right? So you'd go to playtest, melt Arc like butter, kill them, they'd explode, and all the physics that you see in the game was super amazing. Next playtest, the Arc team was super upset that all their efforts on the AI were put basically into the ground by the group with weapons, so they tuned the Arc, and all of a sudden you're playing a Souls game and your weapons mean nothing, right? We were doing that on a daily basis."
Another battle was between the content team, which wanted "a very immersive game" with minimal UI, and the UX team, which believed "we really, really need more UI. We need to tell players what they are experiencing." To illustrate this fight, Braga showcases a version of the game with enemy names, damage numbers, and XP values right in the middle of the screen.
"It is destroying the immersion that the content team did the previous day, right? And this was basically our day to day. Every playtest, we'd be playing one of those five or six different games, and we're just moving to the side," not moving forward toward a shippable game.
"At that point, we had to prove to ourselves the game wasn't fun," Braga explains. "We really did. Because internally, we thought the game was deeper, more fun, better than we actually had in our hands." So the studio invested in external playtests, which provided the feedback that the game was fun "sometimes." As Braga puts it, "we needed a better product, but it had a very good foundation."
Braga admits that "a lot of games would be canceled at this point. Three years in, spending a lot of money, a lot of time – a lot of games would be canceled." But the studio had enough faith in the underlying work it had done on Arc Raiders to try to convince publisher (and Embark owner) Nexon to continue investing in the game as the team went through a major "reset."
"They had to have a lot of patience, and we had to make sure they trusted us," Braga says. "So we kept talking to them a lot, and they gave us one more try. We agreed that this game deserved another try, but again, it needed a reset. So we went down in size to 25 from those 120, and we stopped forcing the game we want, or the games we wanted, all of them. We looked at the game we had, and we had a lot of good foundation there. We had foundation for a very interesting extraction game."
The gamble ultimately paid off, as Nexon reported last month that Arc Raiders "significantly exceeded expectations" with 14 million copies sold as of its first three months on the market. Personally, I still want to know what that co-op Shadow of the Colossus game would've looked like, but maybe it's for the best that we never got to find out.
Check out our Arc Raiders Stable Housing walkthrough and guide.
