Arc Raiders' old machine designs sound so diabolical, it's no wonder they were reworked or removed after poor playtest feedback: 'At that time, they didn't fit with the game very well'

Arc Raiders Expeditions: A raider reloading while looking up at a large, spider-like ARC robot that's about to attack them.

I don't think anyone had it on their bingo cards that Arc Raiders' machine design and AI would be so good that people would fervently demand a PvE mode in an extraction shooter. If you did, then good for you, I guess. But it wasn't always that way, not least because the team was flip-flopping between genres practically every day: One moment the Arc would be Souls-inspired difficulty, and then the next, the players would be the powerhouse.

After Arc Raiders' production director, Caio Braga, mentioned in his GDC talk that their in-house data team were behind several key overhauls, like PvP, we asked him for a history lesson on the Arc machines in a post-talk interview.