While Arc Raiders may be a fantastic extraction shooter today, Embark’s runaway hit spent more of its development time not even in that genre. Originally a free-to-play game, which was changed after monetisation caused issues with the game loop, Arc was also originally a session-based co-op game, until it wasn’t.
Embark Studios has been very vocal about the fact that Arc Raiders saw a pretty troubled development. While many games that struggle with development typically have at least their genre locked down, Embark’s game jumped through multiple game types during the course of its creation.
In a talk at GDC, production director Caio Braga explained that the “no one could answer me what the game was” when they joined the project a year into development. Some people thought the game was a battle royale title, others described it as a hero looter shooter, and others “a co-op Shadow of [the] Colossus game,” reports GamesRadar.
At that point, Arc Raiders’ development team was stacked with 120 devs all working on the game, and all with conflicting ideas of what the game was. Braga said that the team creating weapons “wanted the weapons to feel amazing”, and they felt so good they would “melt Arc like butter”, which made “the Arc team super upset that all their efforts on the AI were put basically into the ground by the group with weapons”.
Braga also recalls skirmishes between the UI team and the UX team with some wanting a minimalist look and others wanting more extensive onboarding for players. Essentially, every aspect of Arc’s early development was like this to the point where internal playtests were pretty much just playing different video games entirely.
“This was basically our day to day,” they explained. “Every playtest, we’d be playing one of those five or six different games, and we’re just moving to the side,” adding that “a lot of games would be cancelled at this point. Three years in, spending a lot of money, a lot of time – a lot of games would be cancelled.”
This also props up recent comments from former Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney, the man who pushed to acquire Embark Studios. Mahoney revealed that there was “a lot of pushback” to the acquisition with his successor recently admitting that there was little faith in Arc Raiders until the game neared completion. Even then, the CEO didn’t expect the game to become as big as it is right now.
Braga reveals that, three years in, Embark had to “find the fun” in Arc Raiders. The studio convinced Nexon to continue investing in the game as they cut the dev team down from 120 workers to 25. “We stopped forcing the game we want, or the games we wanted, all of them,” they continued. “We looked at the game we had, and we had a lot of good foundation there. We had [a] foundation for a very interesting extraction game”.
Game development is extremely difficult, and that’s even when everyone on board is on the same track. Arc Raiders was never envisioned as an extraction shooter; the game was essentially kit-bashed into one with the assets and gameplay the team had on hand from years of making conflicting games. Really, the Arc Raiders we have today is more of a happy accidentality, although that doesn’t diminish the quality of the finished experience.
