Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders may frequently feature PvP between players, but the developers behind the popular extraction shooter don’t want to give players additional reasons to shoot rival players.
With the game’s aggression-based matchmaking confirmed, Arc Raiders already works behind-the-scenes to match prominent PvP players with each other, but Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund doesn’t want to push additional features that would make players focus on fighting each other.
Speaking to GamesBeat, Söderlund explained that adding PvP specific features like leaderboards or a nemesis system would be the antithesis of the game’s core loop. After all, players aren’t supposed to know if a rival player is friendly or not, and pushing more people towards PvP ruins that balance.
“One of the beauties of this game is the fact that we don’t have those leaderboards, and it’s not competitive. We don’t necessarily want to foster that kind of gameplay,” the Embark CEO told the outlet.
Söderlund explained that Arc Raiders “isn’t about shooting other players”, although you can do that as much as you like. “The ethos of the game has never been to go in and shoot players,” the CEO said.
The CEO explains that early versions of Arc Raiders, back when it was a free-to-play PvE game, lacked the tension that players feel just from the possibility of PvP. Going out and killing players isn’t necessarily an objective – outside of daily challenges – but the fact that it exists as a probability (at some point you will encounter it) improves the whole experience.
Söderlund explains that this is important to “craft tension”. As a PvE game, only Arc enemies were your foe, but using everything as a potential foe is much more frightening and much more engaging.
“You hear them shooting—audio is a very important part of this game. You hear them encountering Arc and other players. You see the raider flares as they go down,” the CEO said. “At one point, I came back after a playtest, and the flares were gone, and I just said ‘Bring them back.’ They’re such an iconic part of this game, and they signal to other players that action is happening somewhere. It makes it feel populated in an important way.”
With years of updates planned for the extraction shooter, which has now sold 12 million copies, there is potential that some updates could skewer PvP to be more or less popular, but Embark isn’t planning to frontline the feature. So, if you’re hoping for PvP deathmatch lobbies, they likely won’t happen anytime soon.
