ARC Raiders has become known for its blend of PvP and PvE action thanks to its community of players and the challenges offered by its eponymous ARCs. In an interview with GamesRadar, design lead Virgil Watkins has revealed that Embark Studios has ambitions to make the PvE side even more challenging in the future.
Some of the bigger challenges offered by ARC Raiders right now is its six-legged boss fight known as the Queen, as well as the even-larger Matriarch. However, looking to the future, Watkins has acknowledged that the studio couldn’t introduce a similarly designed robot again. Instead, it has to figure out how it can “escalate the experience for the player.” Left in its current state, players will get too good at killing Queens and Matriarchs, essentially removing any sense of danger that these ARCs might pose.
“I think we are pretty happy with what they are now, but I don’t think we can subsist forever on that,” he explained. “I think eventually, if we introduce yet another six-legged giant spidery robot, it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, we got it.’ So yeah, I think it’s looking toward where we take those types of experiences in the future to something else or something additional, seeing how we can escalate the experience for the player on the PvE side.
“Especially because we’ve seen – as players get more advanced with the game, more sophisticated in their approach, or they just understand how to play better – the current set of drones becomes much less of a threat to them. They’ve figured out their attack patterns and how to avoid them, or how to deal with them quickly and things like that. So I think continuing to escalate that is where we’re looking at growing next.”
When it comes to this kind of escalation, however, Watkins has also noted that one of the bigger challenges for Embark Studios is the practicality of more challenging ARCs running on its server infrastructure. While the studio has large ambitions, it is also grappling with the idea that adding more gigantic ARC for players to take on might cause its servers to “blow up.”
“That is the challenge,” Watkins explained. “We want to go wherever’s practical for us, or wherever feels fun, but then you start running into the practical side of, will this blow up the server? Can it even support these kinds of things? Our ambitions are definitely large, and I’m not going to say that you’re going to meet one anytime soon, but obviously, you see the giant walking ones in the background and stuff. That’s what we’re trying to show some contrast with as we go forward.”
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The PvPvE extraction shooter has been quite popular since its October release, and the studio’s parent company Nexon even revealed earlier this month that it had sold more than 12.4 million copies so far. Looking to the future, Watkins has also said that there are plans to release “multiple maps” throughout 2026 that will come in varying sizes. For more details about the state of ARC Raiders from when it first came out, check out our review.
