It’s clear that Embark Studios struggled a lot with the development of Arc Raiders. While the game now boasts 14 million paid players, the title originally started off as a free-to-play title that went through some major design changes multiple times during development.
Arc Raiders’ development was so volatile that production director Caio Braga claimed “a lot of games would be cancelled” if they went through the same process. At one point, Embark was reportedly creating “five or six different games”.
In a recent interview, design director Virgil Watkins explained that the final incarnation of Arc Raiders, was essentially all created in “the last year of development”. After spending its life as a PvE-only game to a game with PvP elements to the actual extraction shooter we know and love, the final gameplay loop was designed in just 12 months.
“Everything is purpose-built for what the game is today”.
Arc Raiders design director Virgil Watkins
“The major downside we were facing is, like, up to that point, no one had even really thought about a meta game,” Watkins says. “Quest givers did not exist, Speranza did not exist, inventory did not exist. People try to pick out elements, like, ‘yeah, you can tell this is from when it was a PvE game’. None of that existed. Nearly everything you see in the game today, that’s in the frontend, was built in the last year of development”.
Watkins explains that fans are always trying to find out what parts of the game are part of the old Arc Raiders, and the reality is that very little of what they can see and play now is from that version of the game. Yes, a lot of the designs are the same, and the machine-learning movement tech of the ARC enemies is foundationally the same, but everything was quickly designed after the team had finally decided on the game they wanted to craft.
“Once we had a target, we can hit it,” he continues. “To our team’s credit, they’re fantastic, we just needed tangible goals. So, it’s kinda funny, people are like: ‘Oh, it used to be a looter shooter’. We didn’t have loot. ‘Oh, these quest givers, that’s from when they had PvE’. And it’s like, no, that didn’t exist either. So, no, everything is purpose-built for what the game is today”.
Watkins explains that the only remaining stuff from the older incarnations of Arc Raiders are pieces of the world—although they note that those assets have been rebuilt “like twice over” and the aforementioned machine-learning tech.
“It’d be hard to know what even from the original things still [are in],” he continues. “Probably the code for zip-lines. I think that’s pretty ancient at this point. Everyone’s afraid to touch it lest it explodes.” Although, judging by the fact that the game is built on the same engine as The Finals, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the zip-line code is reused from Embark’s other project. Why design zip-lines twice, right?
As for why Arc Raiders is now an extraction shooter instead of the PvE game it was originally envisioned and revealed as, Watkins explained that prior versions just didn’t give players a reason to keep coming back. “The ‘why’ was a huge portion,” he says. “While we’ve made this thing that is fun, why do I keep coming back for our 10, 50, 100,000th [time], and at the time the game was free-to-play which then also carries different motivations for players.”
While player counts have substantially dropped for Arc Raiders since its magnificent debut, there is a reason to keep coming back. The game has a super satisfying core loop, and frequent wipes means you always have a goal to come back to.
As Embark looks to the future with ideas such as player trading, a revised skill tree, and a full player hub that allows players to meet each other in 3D space, it becomes even more clear that the released version of Arc Raiders was a quick turnaround.
