Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders is out later this month and it’s current server slam is enjoying popularity among those hyped for the same. It’s reminiscent of the successful playtest from last April, which many speculated would lead to a shadow drop at Summer Game Fest. However, the development team held off because it believed the extraction shooter was “absolutely not ready.”
Speaking to PC Gamer in a recent interview, design director Virgil Watkins said, “It was interesting to see how many people wanted us to drop it, or even shortly after [the playtest], expected us to drop the game. But on our end, the game was absolutely not ready. I’m happy that a lot of people thought the game ran well, but we had a lot of optimization to still do. We had a bunch of features we still needed to finish. There were bugs, and thankfully they didn’t show up too much in a lot of people’s footage, but there were some bad bugs. We had to fix a lot of things.”
Watkins also noted that despite the positive reception, Embark had the “telemetry” to know that “certain things were not exactly doing what they should have” regarding balance. Of course, it’s also working on some new content, including a fresh map.
“We obviously added a new map since Tech Test 2 that you’re aware of, and we’ve teased the fifth, which players will get to start engaging with, kind of, very, very shortly after launch, in a roundabout way. And then just bolstering our item sets, our enemy sets, new map conditions, so they saw the night raids and a few other things in Tech Test 2, and we just extended those to offer new types of play and ways of playing.”
ARC Raiders has had its ups and downs during development. First announced in 2021 as a free-to-play co-op third-person shooter, it transitioned into a PvEvP extraction shooter that required a one-time purchase. Embark also delayed it for three years because it didn’t find the initial product to be much fun.
Launching on October 30th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, ARC Raiders will retail for $39.99. Head here for more details on how it’s handling player progression resets.
