Embark’s huge 14 million-strong player base for Arc Raiders has been praised as one of the friendliest gaming communities around. While there’s always a percentage of dirty cheaters around, the extraction shooter has been blessed with a fairly kind community that often serenades with little in-game flutes.
However, during the game’s play-testing phase, players were extremely aggressive, and not friendly at all. At least, that’s according to design lead Virgil Watkins, who knows a lot more than you or I do.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Watkins explained that he was shocked by the positivity of the fanbase on launch and ever since. “It is not at all how it was working in our tests, either for ourselves or the previous tests,” the design lead said. “It was hyper, hyper aggressive in those tests, people never worked together.”
As a PvPvE game, Arc Raiders was always intended to have people team up and play together to tackle some of the game’s harder challenges. In fact, the original incarnation of the game, even before it was a free-to-play game, was a co-op raid game without any PvP. However, Watkins was stunned at the sheer level of collaboration on display by the game’s fanbase.
“This kind of surprised us, in exactly how many people latch onto, and are having fun with, these [PvE] elements of the game,” he said. “So it certainly encourages us to lean more toward giving opportunities to have friendly and fun interactions.”
Arc Raiders developers have explained that they do not want the game to become focused on PvP, instead having future updates focus on PvE activities and new features such as trading or a walkable hub area. However, Watkins explains that they still “have to primarily make sure that the PvP side of the game is as fair as we can make it… regardless of the formation of this PvE heavy audience”.
“You’re always going to have people who have the motivation to fight,” he continued, “because there are people who just like PvP. We have this cohort of players who want to play more peacefully, or roleplay, ensuring that we don’t harm their experience either.”
For Embaark, Arc Raiders is about “letting players lead with their own motivations”, and this means that Watkins and the team have a lot of respect for players who like to cause “chaos on purpose”. If that’s the type of story that players want to tell, then that’s a type of story that the developers will support.
Arc Raiders’ next update is scheduled to launch next week in the form of Shrouded Sky which will add a new ARC threat, a new map condition and more.
