In light of the recent success of the ARC Raiders server slam, developer Embark Studios has revealed that it doesn’t have any current plans to add first-person mode to the extraction shooter. In an interview with PC Gamer, design director Virgil Watkins spoke about how the extraction shooter was designed from the ground up to make use of its third-person perspective, and how adding a first-person mode will involve many changes to the overall design.
“I think so much of our immersion and world and the interactions that your character has with the things in the world, the enemies, the other players, is so amplified by the quality that’s come from our animation team and our audio team and our environment team, that it works together as this very nice package that you can really place your character in that world,” said Watkins, who also mentioned that, while hybrid models that use both first-person and third-person are possible with titles like Helldivers 2 being an example, too many things about ARC Raiders would need to be changed to add the feature.
“That’s not to say that’s not possible in first person, but [third person] did work so well for us that we never even really looked at first person. And I know there are hybrid models, like Helldivers 2 and a few other games, but I think for us to try to do that, it would cause us to have to re-evaluate so much of how our areas are built and the way they’re laid out, because you get very specific sight lines once you go first person.”
Immersion and gameplay aren’t the only reasons for the third-person perspective. Watkins also noted that the in-game assets for interactive objects and wall textures were designed with the idea that players wouldn’t zoom into these objects. “Once you start being able to put your face right up against an asset, it kind of falls apart,” he said. This means that it is “very, very implausible” that ARC Raiders will get a first-person perspective because, ultimately, it doesn’t “give us a benefit of any sort.”
In the same interview, Watkins had also spoken about Embark Studios sticking to its planned October 30 launch date for ARC Raiders across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. When asked about why the developer didn’t quickly release the title after its playtest earlier this year, he noted that the studio just wasn’t ready.
“I’m happy that a lot of people thought the game ran well, but we had a lot of optimization to still do,” he said. “We had a bunch of features we still needed to finish. There were bugs, and thankfully, they didn’t show up too much in a lot of people’s footage, but there were some bad bugs. We had to fix a lot of things.”
For more details about ARC Raiders, check out how Embark Studios plans to handle a key aspect of the extraction shooter genre – server wipes – by simply giving players the choice. Head here for more details on how that will work.