Arc Raiders has never been more dangerous. Embark Studios dropped its big Flashpoint update right at the end of March, and it has hit players like four surprise plates added to their squat barbell. Arc Raiders is hard now – or hard again, really, with Flashpoint escalating a game that had teeth in the early days but has long felt solved. In its difficulty and quality-of-life changes, Flashpoint is a major step forward, and it’s right in line with Embark’s goal of keeping players on their toes.
After his GDC talk about Arc Raiders’ messy production pivots, production director Caio Braga spoke to GamesRadar+ about how Embark’s development and launch experiences are guiding its future plans. A dominant theme emerged in our discussion: players should not feel safe, no matter how hard they try to tilt odds in their favor with friendly behavior and matchmaking.
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Braga examines the perceived gap between the two extreme player types: Care Bears and cutthroats. People reluctant to shoot even a single raider, and people who aren’t satisfied until they’ve downed about 10.
“I think what the community brings is quite interesting,” he begins, “especially the space we are right now where we have those, I wouldn’t call them opposite, but polar audiences, I think, is a good way to put it in our game. We’re trying to hear the community and understand their problems without having to understand, too much, their solutions, because they don’t see each other very well. When you’re playing as a PvP player, you care about your experience, right? We care about everyone’s experience and how much fun they can have in the game. So I think that’s what changed a lot, the community aspect of it, how we can see through all of the feedback and identify the main problems.”
He touches on a fairly universal truth in games, and it’s one you’ll hear from a lot of developers: players are great at identifying problems, but often bad at proposing solutions to them. Not just because our technical perspective as players is extremely limited as far as what’s feasible or reasonable, but also because we can really only assess our own personal experience. In Arc Raiders, which aims for a PvPvE experience but has devout camps of both PvP and PvE enthusiasts flanking that middle ground, it’s especially easy to favor your own playstyle at the expense of someone else’s fun.
The good news, Braga suggests, is that “the middle ground is much bigger” than those two polarized audiences. “Those two poles are a bit more vocal, I would say,” he continues. “So we have that, the mass of players in between those two things. We see some trends of players who PvP and start to lose too much that go more Care Bear. And the opposite: Care Bears start to get a lot of riches and go PvP. So there is all of that. I think that what we see a lot is the two poles being opinionated, which is very good for us, because we end up getting feedback.”
Playing aggressively but resorting to quiet, stealthy looting after a losing streak? It absolutely couldn’t be me.
Arc Raiders players are getting literally vaporized by Flashpoint’s new Arc, but one daredevil has already figured out the best way to kill them: “I think I just peaked.”
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