The biggest thrill in Arc Raiders is somehow managing to take down a huge ARC while “don’t shoot” screaming at passerby players. While fighting the robotic creatures of Embark’s post-apocalyptic world is fun as it is, the studio wants to create even more cinematic battles in the future.
Every enemy in Arc Raiders is simulated with real-time physics, allowing a Leaper to crash into a wall and plummet to the ground, allowing a Wasp to stumble across the air after you take out one of its propellers. As Embark continues to evolve the game and its physics-based enemies, the team wants to take more advantage of its unique combat.
Speaking to GamesRadar during GDC, Arc Raiders machine learning research lead Martin Singh-Blom explained that the team is working on new techniques that will enable more complex physics simulations within the game. The researcher explained that this would enable a dream scenario: allowing players to recreate Star Wars’ iconic Hoth battle against ARC enemies by pulling them to the ground with tripwires.
“Once we get a breakthrough for one robot, it usually translates really well to the other robots as well.”
Arc Raiders machine learning research lead Martin Singh-Blom
“I think we all have different ideas,” Singh-Blom told the outlet. “Those of us who really work with the physics and make things happen with physics of course want more physics in the game at every turn. We want ropes to pull at legs and wires to trip them, like the Hoth invasion scene in Star Wars where they have the speeders and wrap up the legs. We could do that if we just had better rope physics, right?”
Singh-Blom explained that “those kinds of things we keep pushing for”, although that doesn’t mean they will eventually come to the game. While the physics team are designing systems that would allow for this level of interactivity, it’s up to the game’s designers to implement them if they find it
“The designers are like, ‘Well, it doesn’t fit in our game right now. This is not the vision for this part, or we just don’t have the resources to deal with this kind of stuff right now.’” the machine-learning lead said. “They tend to be much more hooked into what the game actually needs, and we tend to be much more hooked into what we want to do with this new tech.”
The designer explained that some ideas were cut from Arc Raiders before launch because its physics system wasn’t as advanced as they hoped with smoother movement ideas scrapped before launch. However, as both the physics team and the design team continue to work together, the team is working on “new capabilities of robots of all kinds” that “usually translates really well to the other robots as well”.
It’s clear that the Arc Raiders of today will be drastically different from the Arc Raiders of the future. Alongside continued improvements to physics, Embark has already expressed a desire to continue overhauling the game’s social features, including the addition of a hub world version of Speranza to meet new people.
As Embark continues toying with the idea of player trading and more, the game will only continue to get bigger, and hopefully better.
