The success that Embark Studios has seen with ARC Raiders has emboldened the developers to pursue grand new ideas. In an interview with PCGamesN, design director Virgil Watkins spoke about some of the plans the studio has for the extraction shooter, which range from even more maps, to even a potential revamp of the Speranza hub area to change it into being more than just a few menu options.
This revamp would be quite thorough, allowing players to walk around the hub town in a similar manner to Destiny 2’s Tower and the various towns in Monster Hunter games. Watkins noted that the studio has definitely had internal discussions about it going as far back as first designing the current menu-based version of the town. He also spoke about how, even if the hub area can be travelled manually, Embark Studios would also like to hang on to the menu system to allow players a speedier way to take care of their needs. Ultimately, it comes down to waiting for “the right moment”, since the team is also enthusiastic about the idea.
“I mean, we’ve 100% discussed it,” he said. “I think it was like the first question asked when we started building the front end of the game, you know, ‘what would that experience be like?’ It always came down to time and scope for us […] We can build a menu, and the menu will do its job. And, you know, all the extra time involved in making a hub wasn’t worth it, really, or we traded other features for it.”
“For me, personally, I love the vibe and aesthetic of a walkable hub, but I would want to preserve the menuing so that you can do it quickly and efficiently, rather than [having to] run to Celeste and then run to my [raider’s room], and then ‘Oops, I forgot this thing at Shani.’ But there’s also, of course, an immersion factor to that. So yeah, it’s something we have discussed, and we’ll continue to discuss, and I think there’s definitely a good appetite on the team for it as well. It’s more about when the right moment to open that door is.”
Watkins also discussed various other ideas in the interview, such as player-to-player trading. He noted that while it was an interesting idea, it would also diminish the studio’s plans for the game’s progression curve, since a trading system would incentivize players to opt for maximum profit on their runs rather than hunting down items they actually need.
“I think any avenue we go down in terms of player trading has to keep that in mind,” he explained. “It can’t undercut what one of the primary loops of the game is, which is caring about exploring the world, finding the things you need to find, and then caring about getting those things out, rather than, you know, hoarding 3,000 Lance’s Mixtapes to sell so you can then buy all your guns on the trading market.”
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review. Also check out how the studio plans to “escalate” PvE encounters in the future, and how it will expand on the game’s available set of maps throughout the year.
