As Embark Studios gets ready for the October 30 release of its extraction shooter ARC Raiders on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the developer has revealed that it has also been paying attention to other upcoming games in the genre—namely Bungie’s Marathon. In an interview with PCGamer, design director Virgil Watkins spoke about the things Embark Studios learned from the reception of the Marathon playtest, and how it affected ARC Raiders’ development.
Referring to a playtest for Marathon that was held around the same time earlier this year as the playtest for ARC Raiders, Watkins referred to it as a “great A/B test” which allowed Embark Studios to learn more about the decisions it had made with its game as opposed to the decisions that hadn’t yet been made.
“It was very coincidental that they had their test around the time we did,” said Watkins. “To my knowledge, I don’t think any of us knew that was going to happen. It was a very great A/B test for us, because obviously they made decisions that we didn’t, and vice versa. So we could kind of compare and contrast how some of those things shook out.” He went on to note that “[It] was quite interesting to follow in what players thought about those certain things, or what did work in their context and didn’t, and what may have worked in ours.”
Speaking overall, Watkins did mention that he wasn’t exactly paying close attention to Marathon otherwise, thanks to its limited-access playtests. However, he did praise some aspects of the title that he had seen, including finding “the art style very evocative … I’m personally curious to see how that ends up. I hope to see more of that in the future.”
Watkins has similarly revealed quite a few other details about ARC Raiders, including the fact that, since it was designed from the ground-up to be a third-person shooter, it is very unlikely that the studio goes on to add a first-person mode to it.
“I think so much of our immersion and world and the interactions that your character has with the things in the world, the enemies, the other players, is so amplified by the quality that’s come from our animation team and our audio team and our environment team, that it works together as this very nice package that you can really place your character in that world,” said Watkins.
“That’s not to say that’s not possible in first person, but [third person] did work so well for us that we never even really looked at first person. And I know there are hybrid models, like Helldivers 2 and a few other games, but I think for us to try to do that, it would cause us to have to re-evaluate so much of how our areas are built and the way they’re laid out, because you get very specific sight lines once you go first person.”
ARC Raiders recently had a Server Slam playtest over the weekend, which saw quite a bit of success. The PC version alone – via Steam – was able to get almost 190,000 concurrent players. In the meantime, Marathon is also slated to get a playtest starting on October 22.
