In the first episode of a new making-of documentary series created by Embark Studio and Noclip about the development of ARC Raiders, the game’s creative director Stefan Strandberg spoke about how the studio was mixing-and-matching different themes and ideas for the title. In the video, which you can check out below, he also spoke about the tools used by the studio, as well as how different ideas were mashed together.
“Technology-wise, I mean, we quickly settled on Unreal, and then, in conjunction with that, we also had proprietary tech that we were developing,” said Strandberg. He also spoke about some of the different ideas that the developers were coming up with, and how the studio knew it had to use “the prospect of space travel” as one of the core ideas for ARC Raiders. Ultimately, however, it went with “the impending sort of ecological collapse, the rise of AI, and the man versus machine angle.”
“When we were the first initial group sort of vetting different concepts, I think those were the things that were sticky in there,” says Strandberg. “On paper, that was a super compelling concept, especially the ‘making you a small human in a vast world with huge machines.’ That’s what we started to explore. Not knowing at all what kind of game loop we were supposed to have, but just looking at the prospects of different mechanics in that context.”
Strandberg’s description of the initial concepts for ARC Raiders essentially turned it into “some sort of Venn diagram between Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead and PUBG.”
In the same video, studio founder and CEO Patrick Soderlund also spoke about the development of the title, especially early on. Quite a bit of time was spent to make sure that the developers had the right tools, while also ensuring that there was plenty of wiggle room to account for any potential mistakes made in the future.
“We spent the majority of our first year just building tools,” he said. “I also knew that we weren’t going to get things right. We were going to make a ton of mistakes along the way, and we had to plan for those mistakes, and kind of get ourselves in a cushion to be able to make those mistakes.”
Strandberg, on the other hand, spoke about developing the core concept behind what would turn out to be ARC Raiders, and how the developers spent a lot of time ensuring that just the core gameplay on its own was fun enough before moving on to make other parts of the game.
“We developed core mechanics at the same time as we were testing out some initial ideas about the game mode itself,” said Strandberg. “No one was thinking about a larger meta game at that time, like ‘what is the actual economy that drives the players’ motivation,’ and so on. We were literally exploring the initial mechanics of how does it feel to play against these machines.”
“I think all games need to go through that, like ‘is there something fun in the second-to-second mechanics?’ Even in FIFA, if it’s not fun to kick a ball against a wall, it’s not going to be a fun football game. We put these large machines in this large world, and we began testing playing against these large machines just for a pure game and spectacle. There was something there.”
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.
