One of the biggest surprises of last year was the enormous success of the launch of Arc Raiders. It surpassed 12 million players by January, turned out to have Nexon’s most successful launch ever, and enjoyed enough concurrent players to rival even the publisher’s the biggest MMO’s. It’s been a spectacular ride so far. That is, with a few caveats.
Players have been concerned about Arc Raiders’ rougher edges for some time now. There’s been a pretty relentless cheating problem, an ongoing issue with balancing weapons and arcs, and complaints from the community about the lack of endgame content. But rest assured, the devs are at least aware of it all.
“Balancing is always, not really a problem, but something we keep top of mind all the time,” production director Caio Braga says in an interview with GamesRadar. “That is one thing. It’s all new to us, the live environment with this amount of players. We’ve been trying to identify what are the most impactful updates we can give to players. There are a few things that we see that are more engaging and some others less engaging, and because we’re not a huge team, optimizing for that impact is something that we are learning and trying to do better and better in every update.”
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The biggest difficulty in balancing Arc Raiders lies in the way it combines PvE and PvP experiences. PvP-focused players generally want better balanced guns and weaker arcs as they don’t want to be bothered by a pesky robot while hunting down their fellow man. While those more invested in PvE want stronger arcs for lobbies to work together to take down.
Arcs also seem weaker as players get increasingly better at dealing with them, which is a bypbyroduct of a slightly stale end-game. It’s pretty easy right now to get to the point where arcs and even other players aren’t a massive threat to you.
Sure, the expeditions mode helps with this somewhat as it wipes your skill tree and all of your gear, but there’s still a gap in high level threats. Hell, even the Matriarch isn’t a big deal for most players anymore. Have you ever seen a PvE lobby take on one of those? Because I have and it’s terrifying, like watching an insect fall into a weaver ant colony.
“[The endgame] is one of the things we want to keep working on,” Braga adds. “We want to challenge the players. Especially the players that are reaching the end of our content. We want more for them. I want them to have more to do, and because they are at the end of it, it’s also important that we challenge them more and more. It is something we want to continue doing, but always giving players tools as well so that other players can partake of the fun.”
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