The Arc Raiders developers have said in the past that during development playtests that preceded launch, raiders were behaving much more violently toward one another than how we’ve seen in the community post-launch. It’s something that Embark production director Caio Braga mentioned to us multiple times when we spoke to him after his talk at GDC. After all, it took adding PvP to the concept before it started becoming fun in the developers’ eyes.
When we asked Braga about how players received the game compared to their pre-release testing, he replied that “the most obvious [thing] was the PvE crowd.” Frankly, it’s Arc Raiders’ most defining factor in the extraction genre, where many players would rather be allies and stick it to the Arc machines instead. It’s the phenomenon of so-called ‘friendly lobbies’, though Embark insists it’s not that binary.
During development, “Some people on the team had the feeling that it would be nice to play PvE in the game, but we didn’t know, so [the players] proved it to us,” Braga explains. Hindsight’s 20/20, as they say.
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“Nowadays, it’s changed a lot of playtests because our tests have people saying, ‘I actually enjoy PvE, so I’m going to play PvE. Because it’s part of the game, I’m going to represent those players’.”
One of the refrains seen in comment threads around Arc Raiders is for an exclusively PvE mode to be added to the game. And while it was an unexpected fan fixation before launch, it’s evidently been acknowledged and accommodated by the team more since, such as with the Arc-hunting Shared Watch event and removing PvP Feats.
“It’s quite challenging because we have these two, quite polar [types of] fans of the game,” Braga adds, “But it’s also quite interesting as well.”
“We also had a few moments where the team got way too friendly. It was just a few moments, not always, but we would try to balance that a little bit to see how much fun we could have on all ends of it.”
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Allowing both playstyles to have a home in the game is evidently important for Embark, as you can’t have the highs of either end of the scale without the opposite side. That’s also been my reasoning when I’ve seen people ask for a PvE mode, in that it makes those random friendly encounters a lot less special when it’s not down to luck. You could shoot each other, but you’ve actively chosen not to.
