While Bungie’s Marathon is renowned for its almost psychotic playerbase, Emabark Studios’ Arc Raiders is known for its friendlier players that often help others complete quests, take down Arcs, and allow them to live just that little bit longer.
Despite the Arc community’s friendliness, the extraction shooter was not designed that way. In fact, as the developers have discussed multiple times in the past, the friendliness of the game’s community was a huge shock as initial playtests were hyper-focused on the PvP loop.
As Embark pushes to not further incentivise PvP, the game’s internal playtests are now designed around the niceness of the game’s community. “We played quite aggressively internally,” production director Caio Braga told GamesRadar in a recent discussion. “In our play tests, we are more PvP-leaning, but every now and then our team tries outright not to play PvP and to be a bit more friendly.”
Braga explained that the game’s iconic “Don’t Shoot” emote was almost removed because the devs “play very aggressively”. The designer remembered people asking “who is going to use this?”, but the game’s weapon designer “was very, very keen on keeping the ‘don’t shoot’ emote”.
“That was one of the moments where the team said, ‘No, no, we believe players will use this.’ And it’s there and now people really like that and use it,” the production director told the outlet. Thank God they did as well, because how friendly would players be if that emote didn’t exist within the game?
Braga explained that the team isn’t just playtesting in a friendly way. As the team “playtest every day”, they try to replicate different types of players—raiders who just beeline quests, PvP-hungry hunters, and “Care Bear” players.
“So one day I’m playing as a Care Bear, the other day I’m very aggressive,” he continued, explaining that he uses a randomiser for the way he will play during testing. “Sometimes I’m just doing quests. Some people in the team also use that randomiser just to try to put themselves in the shoes of those players and see what would be nice for them. We’re building it for fun, right? We want to provide as much fun as we can. So it’s good to understand all of those players.”
Arc Raiders’ next major update, Flashpoint, is almost upon us with the game’s deadly Shredder enemies seemingly departing from Stella Montis alongside a new threat. As Embark aims to increase the social features of the game as time goes on, it seems that the studio will be doubling down on its PvE aspect even further with future updates.
