ARC Raiders doesn’t show enemy health bars, and that’s intentional. Embark Studios founder and chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg says the team scrapped the UI staples to protect immersion and push players to read the world, not the HUD.
In a new interview with GamesRadar, he recalls that an earlier PvE-only build actually did include health bars, damage numbers, and hit indicators, because “it’s something you can autopilot to as a developer.” But as ARC Raiders evolved, the studio decided the shooter’s physical simulation and feedback: smoke, sparks, shattered armor, and persistent damage on machines you encounter, already communicates what you need to know in combat.
Strandberg argues that slapping numerical answers on top of a richly simulated space undermines the whole point of building that space. “Our game has physical properties, and we are building really immersive, three-dimensional worlds… There are so many cues in the sound, in the VFX, in everything,” he says. “If you put a damage number on top, or a health bar, that’s redundant. Now you’re playing the Excel sheet of a game!”
He adds that the team chose to “trust the players more” to let intuition and observation replace omniscient overlays, because “Why am I getting all the answers in a 2D format on top of 3D?”
The result is a philosophy that treats readability as an in-world craft problem instead of a UI checklist. Strandberg stresses this isn’t a blanket indictment of other games; some titles with bars are great, but for Embark, minimizing HUD clutter makes its extraction firefights feel closer to an embodied skirmish than a spreadsheet exercise.
Bottom line: ARC Raiders’ no-bar stance won’t satisfy every min-maxer, but it’s a coherent bet: teach with smoke, sparks, and scars, not numbers. If the cues stay readable at speed, Embark’s “trust the player” approach could become a reference point for immersion-first shooters.
