Embark Studios – the studio behind PvPvE extraction shooter ARC Raiders – has started a new documentary series about the game’s development alongside Noclip. In the first episode of the series, the studio spoke about how many changes the title had gone through since development first started, and how many mistakes were made in the process.
Studio founder and CEO Patrick Soderlund spoke about how the first year of the development of ARC Raiders largely revolved around the developers building tools they would need to make and support ARC Raiders. He also spoke about planning for the future, and how the studio had to make sure it had some wiggle room in case it made mistakes down the line.
“We spent the majority of our first year just building tools,” he said. “I also knew that we weren’t going to get things right. We were going to make a ton of mistakes along the way and we had to plan for those mistakes, and kind of get ourselves in a cushion to be able to make those mistakes.”
Creative director Stefan Strandberg spoke about how development on ARC Raiders first started with the studio figuring out how to make sure that fighting against robots was fun. This is especially noteworthy since ARC Raiders was originally announced as a PvE-only title that would, over the course of its development, also bring in elements of PvP before becoming the extraction shooter we know and love today.
“We developed core mechanics at the same time as we were testing out some initial ideas about the game mode itself,” said Strandberg. “No one was thinking about a larger meta game at that time, like ‘what is the actual economy that drives the players’ motivation,’ and so on. We were literally exploring the initial mechanics of how does it feel to play against these machines.”
“I think all games need to go through that, like ‘is there something fun in the second-to-second mechanics?’ Even in FIFA, if it’s not fun to kick a ball against a wall, it’s not going to be a fun football game. We put put these large machines in this large world and we began testing out playing against these large machines just from a pure game and spectacle. There was something there.”
Executive producer Aleksander Grondal also spoke about the changes that the title went through, and how difficult it often is for developers to “find the fun” for a game they might be making.
“Finding the fun isn’t always a thing that you cannot just automatically say, ‘We’ll just do this and it will be fun’”, he said. “What you know is: you work and you put the thing in and it’s not working like you want it to. So, then, you need to start reworking it and reiterating on it and maybe rethinking some of your initial assumptions… That comes from playing the game and playing around with what you’ve created.”
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.
