Embark Studios opens ARC Raiders documentary with surprising look behind the scenes – That’s Gaming

Embark Studios, known for the PvPvE-extraction shooter ARC Raiders, has partnered with Noclip on a new documentary series about the game’s development. In the first episode, we get a candid look at the title’s turbulent early years – including mistakes, detours and a completely revised game concept.

A year of… building tools

Studio founder and CEO Patrick Söderlund says the first year of ARC Raiders was hardly about the game itself.
The team was mostly concerned with building the tools needed to make the project possible at all.

“We knew we would make a lot of mistakes,” says Söderlund. “So we had to create space to accommodate that. We gave ourselves a buffer to survive those mistakes.”

From PvE to PvPvE – and first determine if robots are fun at all

Creative director Stefan Strandberg elaborates on the search for the core of the gameplay. ARC Raiders once began as a purely PvE project. PvP elements and eventually an extraction format came much later.

And before loot economy, progression systems or meta-structures were even considered, there was one simple question:

Is it fun to fight these robots?

“We weren’t testing anything other than: how does it feel to play against these machines?” explains Strandberg.
“If that’s not fun, then nothing else matters.”

He compares it to FIFA:
“If it’s not fun to kick a ball into a wall, it’s never going to be a fun game of soccer.”

“Finding the fun is hard work

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal emphasizes how difficult the process is to figure out what really makes a game fun.

“You put something in the game, play it – and often it doesn’t work at all the way you thought it would,” he says.
“Then you have to go back to the drawing board, throw things around and sometimes reevaluate your whole assumptions.”

According to Grøndal, everything is ultimately about iteration, testing and fine-tuning – just until the gameplay feels just right.

ARC Raiders today

ARC Raiders has now become a full-fledged PvPvE extraction shooter and is available at PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The documentary has only just begun, and promises to provide more fascinating insights into the evolution of the game.