No one at Embark could describe Arc Raiders before its extraction shooter pivot, leading to 'playtest battles' of competing directions for the game

Embark has not shied away from discussing its original plans for Arc Raiders, which were drastically different from what ultimately emerged. It was supposed to be a more PvE-focused game before it became the extraction shooter hit it is today.

In a GDC talk, Arc Raiders production director Caio Braga went into more detail about the direction—more accurately, directions—the team explored early on. Braga explained that when he joined the team in 2020, no one could give him a clear idea of what the game actually was.

"You'd ask someone who would say it was a battle royale versus Arc, or it's a co-op Shadow of the Colossus game, or it's a hero looter shooter…our Arc developers thought the game was a co-op Souls game." For Braga, he saw it as a boss fight race with obstacles.

Because of Embark's structure and philosophy during development, the team was very autonomous: "Everyone in the team could do what they believed the game was". Of course, with so many different ideas about what Arc Raiders was, the project was pulled in many different directions at the same time. It sounds like the proverbial 'too many cooks in the kitchen'.

Braga recalled playtests where they'd try out a feature, only to have the next test undermine it. The weapons team would make weapons that could melt Arc, and the team behind the machines' intricate AI would up the Arc: The Arc became harder, and the weapons less impactful.

At another point during development there was basically no UI, which developers thought would help ramp up the immersion, but then the UX team felt there wasn't enough information for the players, so it went in the opposite direction and overshot with XP, enemy names, and damage numbers.

"We were doing this on a daily basis," Braga explains. "Every play test would be playing one of those five or six different games", or spins on the core loop of spawning in, running to the boss, and killing it before the other players.

This eventually led to two major pivots. The first, known as Hail Mary, was to have a much stricter vision and actually settle on a direction. While internal testing pointed towards the game being fun, external playtesting told a different story. It wasn't consistently fun.

This is what Embark calls the reset. Reflecting on it, Braga noted that "a lot of games would have been cancelled at this point," after spending three years and a lot of money on it. But with a strong foundation, like enemy AI, sound effects, and maps, the team "needed a bigger change."

"We stopped forcing the game [or games] we wanted, and we looked at the game we had." This led them to an extraction shooter, capitalising on Embark's established experience with PvP with The Finals, and many developers' past at EA's DICE.

Shrinking the 120-person team down to just 25 (it later grew again), production became much more focused as they built upon what they called the four pillars: high stakes, choice and agency, fidelity and depth, and accessibility. Those principles are very much apparent in Arc Raiders as we know it today, offering a high-stakes extraction shooter but with a much lower barrier to entry. It's casual without lacking depth. Hell, you can even roleplay and make friends with other players if you'd like to.

As much as I'd love to see how a PvE boss-rush mode would actually play out today, Embark was right to pivot towards an extraction shooter. It's the first of its kind to really break into the mainstream in many ways, and I don't think it would have seen that same success as a F2P raid race.