ARC Raiders boss talks "terrifying" fan reaction, and the PvE idea they "could not figure out"

From Embark Studios, the developer who brought us another boundary-pushing shooter in The Finals, ARC Raiders has burrowed its way up from obscurity and firmly into the limelight, much like the titular Raiders of subterranean Speranza.

Ahead of its launch, we spoke with design director Virgil Watkins about the response to the game, which has been beyond what he or anyone else at Embark expected.

"Exciting, terrifying, gratifying," he remarks. "I think this really kicked off with Tech Test 2, and the response we got from that, we did not expect whatsoever. We were happy with what we had, but I don't think [we] expected the reach that it obtained.

"And then, obviously, that got very dialled up very fast, and then we had Server Slam, which I think helped cement a lot of that for people."

Naturally, that exponentially higher attention led to increased pressure, but also buoyed the developers.

"The vacuum fills with expectations and hopes and dreams. So, I hope we meet most of them. I hope people continue to trust in what we've said we're going to do, and what we've tried to bring to the game and what we intend to do. So, I think that's the part I'm most keen to see resolved, is that they resonate with what we've done."

I question Virgil about the game's setting, a unique post-apocalypse in which survivors are forced underground by the sky-borne ARC, rather than dropping in from above as in many others.

"It's a bit of a mix, right? Because, you know, we had the original version of the game, I suppose, when it was PvE, which carried a lot of these premises. Like the machines come from the sky, so we're forced to hide, which, because we stuck with the enemy designs and that fiction, it forced us to make some interesting changes."

He goes on to explain how the game's setting has influenced its gameplay: "So, a lot of extraction games, you either go stand in a mysterious spot and disappear, or in some, you get on a helicopter and fly away.

But since humans are no longer capable of flying in our fiction, we're like, "Well, where do they go?" That's underground. So, we had to invent a suite of extractions that made sense to go down rather than up and out, so that's been quite fun to actually work around as a design challenge."

ARC Raiders' unique setting lends itself further to another unique aspect among extraction shooters, which is that it has a story element to it.

Quests require players to find certain items and locations in one map that allow for progression in another map, bringing the lore front and centre.

"It's one thing to have a quest that just delivers dialogue and exposition and things to you," Virgil explains, "but I think it's also super nice to have the player discover it themselves to some degree, and that it lends to that sense of discovery, and you yourself are the one stitching together elements of the world or pieces of a story.

"And I think that can become very compelling to players, to find things on their own rather than being fed."

This core premise has been a part of the game from very early on, transferring over from its aforementioned PvE era, which Virgil looks back on with mixed feelings.

"There were moments in the game that were outstanding, and it's like nothing you would have ever experienced before. The problem was how repeatable it was. You might have one session that's amazing, and then you have nine sessions that sucked.

"You would run through an open desert for 45 minutes and not see a single thing to fight or a single thing to pick up or anything. And then someone else would have killed the giant robot.

"A lot of people suspect that it was like a looter shooter or something, but it never even got that far. There was never an inventory. There were never drops. We took every element that was good from that game and put it into this game, which was the AI and the environments, the movement, style and some of the initial systems, but it was just that.

"We could not figure out a way to turn that format into a free-to-play title that people would feel invested in playing or would keep coming back to play."

ARC Raiders is far from the only extraction shooter on the market, though it has managed to succeed in a genre where many have tried and failed. On that genre shift, Virgil recalls a level of trepidation among the Embark team.

"When we made the call to switch [from PvE], there really weren't many games on the horizon. So, we're like, "Okay, maybe we'll sneak in there." But then, of course, over time tons of games tried and had varying degrees of success, or established titles maybe tried their own hand at it as a side mode.

"So, we got a lot of good contact with what was attempted, what maybe did or didn't work. So, of course, there's always a measure of nervousness around that.

"But I think because we haven't seen anything get latched onto by the public, and the fact that I think we feel very strongly about the approaches we've taken, the aesthetics we've gone for, the way the game feels to play – I think adds up to enough that it stands out, and it seems like we're having a decent amount of people respond to that in the way we hope."

I briefly ask Virgil about where ARC Raiders sits in relation to The Finals, Embark's other live service title. He confirms that fans of The Finals have nothing to worry about when it comes to development focus.

"They should not be concerned. It's two separate teams. We have shared teams, but they're already divided in duties between the two, so I would not be able to say that there's an impact I'd be aware of.

"We've purposefully kept it separate such that both projects are staffed and we share resources or people on a small scale, like 'Hey, come help us finish this asset' or something."

In fact, ARC Raiders has plenty to thank The Finals for on the tech side – "we're both on the same branch of Unreal 5 that we maintain, so we can share a lot of tools and techniques for things," Virgil confirms.

He goes on to explain that a shared rendering team is one of the secrets behind how fantastically optimised ARC Raiders is.

"On the rendering side, full credit to our game performance team. They do a lot of fantastic work, but also, we have, thankfully, a lot of pretty seasoned and talented developers who – while we build the game – do things in very forward thinking ways about how it impacts performance, how it leads to CPU and GPU hits."

At this point, word of mouth has probably done enough to sell prospective players on the ARC Raiders experience, but Virgil provides one last pitch to the unconvinced.

"One of the core parts of the game we wanted to strive for is approachability. We've put a lot of systems and a lot of work into the game to make sure that people who are maybe nervous about extraction games or are nervous about PvP games can try it and have enough in the game to fall back on or support them to keep trying it.

"So, all I would really say is be encouraged to give it a go, and if it's not for you, it's not for you – that's fine. But I would love it if people could give it a try and just see if we've done enough to welcome them into the types of stories and gameplay and wild moments that can unfold in this style of game and hopefully maybe change their mind about what that could mean for them in this genre or this type of game mode."

ARC Raiders is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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