Arc Raider devs want future Expeditions to be less about fat stacks and FOMO

Arc Raiders recently concluded its first Expedition, this being a voluntary, narrative-led character reset achieved by hoarding and donating resources over a set period. The idea is vaguely that ou’re funding a mighty caravan to the boondocks. In return, you’ll get tiered rewards such as faster progression, bonus skill points and a larger stash. Participation in Expedition is split across various stages with different completion requirements – the final leg of the first one saw players amassing non-specific items worth hundreds of thousands of coins.

Being opt-in, Expeditions are designed to be a gentler alternative to the playerbase-wide seasonal ‘prestiging’ mechanics or progression wipes of other online games. Developers Embark say just over a million people took part in the first Expedition – Arc Raiders has sold around 12 million copies to date – with “something close to about 35% or 40%” of those players bagging the full set of Expedition skill points, in the words of design director Virgil Watkins.

I am no StatWhisperer and cannot say whether this is an amazing success, by the standards of games with progress resets. Watkins feels it’s a good start, but also says there’s room for improvement. Specifically, he thinks the closing stage of the inaugural expedition was too much of a slog for pennies.

“One of the bigger topics [of feedback] was the requirements for the final stage to get the skill points,” he told PCGamesN in a new interview, “and probably going out a bit too late with that information, because we wanted to hold off until we could calibrate it around the actual economy of the player base, rather than trying to guess really early on.”

“So then, when we chose the number, which was the five million credits for the full thing, [we set] that as an aspirational goal that some players might achieve. But then I think a lot of players took that as like, ‘Well, now I have to do that to get it.'”

Watkins would like future Expeditions to be about more than amassing huge amounts of cash. “We completely acknowledge that it isn’t the most engaging thing to just go for money,” he continued, “[and it has] the potential outcome of disincentivizing using your gear, which is kind of what people look forward to towards the end of a reset cycle. So yeah, we’re looking at revisions on that.”

Aside from going over reactions to the Expedition rewards in themselves, the developers are studying player data to see if they can “bring a little more variety” to the process for more casual Expedition participants. They don’t want these players to “feel as though they’re being left [behind],” Watkins said.

Personally, I’m rarely enticed by opportunities to ‘prestige’ a character. I don’t find grinding for the privilege of giving it all away very prestigious. I’d be more interested if there were some degree of mystery involved – perhaps it could be less about building percentages, more about solving an oblique puzzle that requires a resource investment of some kind.

I do acknowledge that designing what are broadly exercises in rebalancing an in-game economy takes a lot of skill – Embark have elsewhere talked to us intriguingly about the dark art of creating a “meaningful” item meta. Anyway, did you join the Expedition? How did it go?