Embark Studios has announced that its PvE toggle testing in ARC Raiders has come to an end. In a post on its website, the studio revealed that more than 30 million rounds of PvE matches were played over the course of the testing period, and that this has given the studio plenty of data that can then be studied and analyzed in order to bring further improvements to the PvEvP extraction shooter.
The studio has also acknowledged that the PvE toggle had been a “polarizing” addition to the game, and to that end, no big changes are planned for ARC Raiders for the time being. Instead, the studio will “prioritize the overall health and enjoyability of the game” before considering any big changes. More details about how the team plans to proceed and whether or not PvE could become a full-time addition to ARC Raiders will come next month.
The PvE toggle was added to ARC Raiders on October 14th, giving players the chance to hop into the game and partake in PvE content without having to worry about fighting other players. To address the fact that PvE would offer lower risk to players, Embark had also made sure that the loot value would be lower. Along with this, map conditions like Frigate and Redirection were also unavailable in the mode.
Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal had spoken about the decision to test out a PvE mode in ARC Raiders, noting that the game already had what could essentially be called PvE servers where players never engaged in combat with each other. “We kind of got to the point where it’s like, these friendly servers, they are almost playing out like they don’t have PvP in them at all, and people seem to be enjoying that. We could see that group of people was consistently growing a little bit over the history of the game.”
Discussing a group of players that he referred to as “dad gamers”, Grøndal noted that they tend to have limited amounts of time to play on a regular basis, and “just want to go out and complete some objectives.” To that end, this kind of player also avoids PvP as much as possible.
“Every time they feel like they get defeated by someone extraction camping or someone else with higher gear, it’s just frustration for them. And they express this pretty vocally. ‘I love the game, I just want to play the game, but I really don’t like dealing with other players in that way.’ OK, we hear you. If you like the game that you are playing, and if we just remove the pain the other players are giving you, that’s a fairly simple thing we can try to implement.”
The PvE toggle was added shortly after ARC Raiders got its Frozen Trail update, which led to a large surge of players hopping into the extraction shooter. As for what the future holds, Embark is seemingly also considering splitting PvE and PvPvE content apart almost entirely.
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
