The upcoming release of Battlefield 6 has had many in the gaming industry raise an eyebrow in anticipation, including former vice president and general manager of Battlefield developer DICE and now CEO of Embark Studios, Patrick Söderlund. In a new interview with Edge Magazine (via WCCFTech), Söderlund has spoken about the upcoming shooter, as well as Embark Studios’ own projects in THE FINALS and the upcoming ARC Raiders.
Söderlund spoke about how Battlefield 6 “looks really good”, and the feeling of seeing it in action being “odd” since he was a part of DICE when the franchise was still quite young. However, he does note that he is happy that the upcoming shooter looks great, joking that he will play it until ARC Raiders is out at the end of the month, after which he will switch to his own studio’s title.
“It is odd,” said Söderlund. “I mean, we built Battlefield! But honestly, when I saw Battlefield 6 and what the team has done with it, I know how much time and energy has gone into it. I think it looks really good, and I’m very happy it does look good. It’s an IP and a game that deserves to be great. I want to play it. And I will play it – until the day we release ARC Raiders. And then I will play ARC Raiders instead.”
As for THE FINALS, Söderlund also spoke about how Embark Studios plans to continue support for the competitive shooter. He noted that, while the player base for the game had dipped a bit around the end of 2024, it eventually started seeing an uplift. To gauge whether or not to continue supporting a game, Söderlund said that the studio follows a 12-month cycle where it observes how well a title might be doing.
“We take a 12-month approach, reviewing on an annual basis,” Söderlund explained. “In December 2024, it’d been out for a year, we sat down and said, ‘We’ll give it one more year and see what happens’. And then, relatively quickly, during the spring, we saw an uplift. So, right now, I don’t see a reason why we shouldn’t continue supporting it for the next five years, to be honest.”
In the same interview, Söderlund had also spoken about the development of ARC Raiders, and how the studio decided to switch from it originally being a PvE-only game to eventually becoming a PvPvE extraction shooter. Söderlund noted that early builds of the game just weren’t turning out to be fun, leading to it getting delayed a few times.
We loved every aspect of what we were trying to design,” said Soderlund. “But we came to the conclusion, after quite a long time: ‘Guys, this game is not fun’.”
Executive producer Aleksandr Grondal, who was eventually brought into the team for the last six months of ARC Raiders’ development to help fix it up, spoke about how “there’s moments of fun, but it doesn’t consistently gel.”
ARC Raiders is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 30.
