With ARC Raiders getting closer to its next major update, which was teased earlier this week, production director Caio Braga has discussed one of the biggest problems faced by the PvPvE extraction shooter these days—the lack of content for players that have already done everything else. In an interview with GamesRadar, Braga discussed Embark Studios’ triage process of game development, where the team identifies problems and starts working on ways to fix them.
“We do use the same [process],” he explained. “When we did the reset, it was the whole team, right? We were 25 people. So it’s easier to say, these are the top problems. We’re 120 [now], so what happens is, it’s just spread a little bit more. It’s not the whole team. It’s more like a problem goes to the UX team. They do the same, but it’s for UX. So the top three problems, top 10 improvements, and what’s good enough, we sign off together, and then they start to work on the problem-solving. Sometimes we say this problem is general, every team has to contribute, so it’s a bit different because of the size, where it’s basically multiplying that for the five internal teams.”
This results in the team working on fixing problems in a reactive manner, which tends to work “in parallel” with other members of the team working on major content drops. As for what kinds of problems the studio has identified for now, he noted that game balance is always on the studio’s mind, along with having to identify what kind of new content would be appropriate for players that have already accomplished everything else ARC Raiders has to offer.
“Balancing is always, not really a problem, but something we keep top of mind all the time,” said Braga. “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.”
Ultimately, he noted that the studio also wants to continue ramping up the challenges offered by ARC Raiders. “It is one of the things we want to keep working on. We want to challenge the players,” he explained. “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.”
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Since the title has done incredibly well since its release, parent company Nexon celebrated the fact by promoting studio CEO Patrick Söderlund to the role of executive chairman.
