On November 22, EmbarkStudios released the first episode of the documentary series "The Evolution of ARC Raiders" that introduces the behind-the-scenes development of "ARC Raiders".This episode tells the story of why the gameplay of this game has changed significantly from the original PvE to PvPvE.
"ARC Raiders" is a PvPvE evacuation shooting game that supports single player play or a team of up to three people.The game is set in a future Earth that has been destroyed by a mysterious machine called ARC. Players will play the role of a desperate gunman named "Raider" and fight ARC and other hostile Raiders on the surface.The precious materials obtained through combat and exploration need to be brought back to the underground living area "Esperanza".
This game gained huge popularity immediately after its release on October 30.On November 16, it set a record of 481,966 people online at the same time on Steam.And on November 11, the official also announced that the global sales of the game exceeded 4 million copies, and the number of simultaneous online players on all platforms exceeded 700,000.
The “Pure PvE” Difficulty
ARC Raiders is better known today as a PvPvE extraction shooter, but in its early stages of development, it was announced as a large-scale cooperative PvE title (related article).After that, game design underwent a major shift, and this documentary details the specific process.
The original "ARC Raiders" was an arcade-style PvE Raid game in which you controlled a fixed hero character and worked with your teammates to fight against giant machines in a vast open environment.The development team described its goal at the time as "a game between Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead and PUBG."
However, although grand and exciting battle scenes can often be generated, most of these scenes occur accidentally and are difficult to serve as "an experience that can be stably provided."Players may not encounter anything after running for a long time in the vast map; the behavior of giant robots is difficult to control, and sometimes battles end instantly; and the experience gap between different rounds is huge.Coupled with the increase in remote working due to the epidemic, it is difficult for teams to share "operational feel" in real time, and projects gradually lose cohesion.
Faced with the bottleneck, EmbarkStudios launched a six-month reconstruction phase called "Pivot" - a work that was originally expected to take two years, but was compressed into a "resurrection" plan completed in half a year.The team narrowed down the scope of the world and focused on some areas, trying to polish "an absolutely fun experience" first.Although wonderful moments reappeared in the test, the metagame structure and driving force that can encourage players to continue playing are still weak, leading to the unsolved fundamental problem of "there are good moments but not playing for a long time".At this stage, the team gradually became clear that the completion of a pure PvERaid game would be difficult to satisfy.
Decision to introduce PvP
After the Pivot stage, studio founder Patrick Söderlund's suggestion that PvP should be added since the early days finally became a realistic option.At this time, there are only three paths before the team: release it in its current state and accept harsh reviews; simply terminate the project; or reconstruct the game while retaining assets.Eventually they chose to restructure and enter a stage called "Reset".
The reset phase is not simply to join PvP, but to completely redefine the game type into PvPvE evacuation shooting.The "flavor of ARC Raiders" such as the artistic style, level design, and AI robot movements are retained; however, the hero action gameplay, the PvE loop dominated by large Raid Bosses, and the design based on free play are all discarded.As a result, "ARC Raiders" went from "a game about jumping on a giant robot and hammering it to pieces" to "a game about escaping back to base with resources under the threat of a giant robot", and finally to today's PvPvE system.
In the first episode of the documentary, the team recounts how the initial concept evolved into its current form, revealing key turning points.Around the 15 minutes and 12 seconds of the video, you can also see abandoned content such as "Jet Jump Boots", which is quite interesting for players.The documentary series has 3 episodes in total and will be updated with one episode every week.The next episode will discuss important topics such as "why free-to-play mode was abandoned", which is also critical to understanding the development direction.
