After having wrapped up its Server Slam playtest for ARC Raiders, developer Embark Studios has now revealed details about what it learned from the event, and how it will be changing the game up as it gets closer to its October 30 launch on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. In its post, the studio has noted four main things as part of its takeaways from the Server Slam: Stability, the Flying ARCs, the Dam Tower, and the visual difference.
Embark Studios praised the ARC Raiders Server Slam players for helping the developer identify stability issues which could quickly be resolved. As for the Flying ARCs, the studio acknowledged that they had unintentionally over-powered vision, which has since been changed up for them to “offer a fairer fight at launch.” The Dam Tower is also going to be less accessible to players when the game comes out, since the location is set to house valuable resources. The visual settings had also been tuned to favour performance over raw visual fidelity, and the studio has noted that it is still trying to strike the right balance.
Along with these takeaways, the studio has also revealed some interesting statistics about the Server Slam. Over the last weekend, 30 million rounds of ARC Raiders had been played. During these rounds, players had destroyed 58 million ARCs. The deadliest ARC was apparently the Rocketeer, which managed to knock down more than 2.3 million players. However, players were also able to band together to take out the most powerful ARC in the Server Slam – the Queen – of which 77 were eliminated. The most favoured weapon by players throughout the playtest was seemingly the Ferro.
As for some of the funnier stats, 816,162 rubber ducks and 96,000 recorders had been collected by players over the weekend. As a result, 2,669 players got knocked down while they were playing the recorder. Exploration was also quite hazardous, with 26,676 players getting knocked down just because of lightning.
The PC version of the ARC Raiders Server Slam managed to do quite well, with SteamDB reporting that it was able to hit a peak concurrent player count of 189,668. The Server Slam featured a single location in the Rust Belt – the Dam Battlegrounds – where players had to scavenge for resources, fight off ARCs, other players, and potentially even team up with other crews to take on the massive, dangerous Queen.
Shortly after the server slam, design director Virgil Watkins revealed that ARC Raiders probably won’t be getting a first-person mode, saying that the game “kind of falls apart” if played in first-person. Among the main reasons for the third-person camera of the game, according to Watkins, are immersion with the world, and technical reasons like some assets needing to be of lower resolution.
Watkins also spoke about keeping an eye on other PvPvE extraction shooters, like Bungie’s Marathon, which also had a playtest at around the same time as the one ARC Raiders got earlier this year. He referred to it as a “great A/B test” for the studio in terms of which features worked, and which ones didn’t.
