Embark Studios hasn’t exactly kept the fact that ARC Raiders uses a form of aggression-based matchmaking a secret. In a new interview with PCGamer, however, design director Virgil Watkins has gone into more details about the system, and how it is “not nearly as binary” as players might think. He also confirmed that the studio itself doesn’t use the name aggression-based matchmaking to refer to its system.
“It’s not nearly as binary as people think”, said Watkins. “There’s no such thing as a friendly lobby or an aggressive lobby, the system is still mixing everybody. I think people do feel as though it’s incredibly binary, and even shooting one raider, one time, just automatically puts you into an aggressive lobby. But that’s not at all how it works.”
While players might have come up with their own ideas about how the matchmaking might work, Watkins has noted that, rather than punishing players for a single errant shot or looting corpses, the game instead tracks player behaviour over a longer period of time.
“Your engagement with PvP is part of the situation, and it’s not as though one action does it. It’s a series of rounds together and things like that,” he explained.
Watkins also noted that, despite some players finding safer lobbies, the tension created by the possibility of PvP is an important factor in making ARC Raiders more engaging. However, he also acknowledged that “people are having a lot of fun with these safer lobbies.”
“I think it kind of surprised us in exactly how many people [did] latch on to and are having fun with these elements of the game. So it certainly encourages us to lean more forward into giving opportunities to have friendly and fun interactions … but of course, we still need to cater to the PvP audience,” he said.
On the subject of the general friendliness of the ARC Raiders community, Watkins also noted that the studio didn’t make any actual push towards that kind of player attitude. Rather, the game’s design encouraged it. “Everything’s down to human motivation,” he said.
Interestingly, ARC Raiders recently introduced a limited-time co-op focused event that rewards players for taking down ARCs with extra rewards. Engaging in PvP in the mode, while still possible, offers no additional rewards, however. The same update also brought in Cold Snap as a permanent addition to the extraction shooter’s rotating list of map conditions.
The studio has also been quite open about expanding on the social aspects of ARC Raiders, with CEO Patrick Söderlund referring to the game’s home base—Speranza—as being “heavily underutilized.”
“One of the discussions that I think is, to some extent, public is ‘What’s Speranza?’ I think Speranza is heavily underutilized, personally. I think that’s something that we want to, probably, improve and make into something else. Are there elements of the game where there could be meeting points? Again, these are personal ideas, right now, that I’m basically brainstorming with you, but the Speranza idea is obviously something that I think people have told us about, something that I think could be cool.” he said.
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review of its launch version for more details.
