ARC Raiders has done quite well for itself despite launching around the same time as two genre heavyweights—Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Competing with these games was no easy task, according to Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund, who said in a recent interview with GamesBeat that the studio had to pursue new development methodologies because of its relatively young age.
The difference comes down to scale, with Söderlund noting that Embark Studios would have to expand massively just to be able to compete with Activision and EA. However, the studio didn’t want to go down that route, and decided that refining its development pipeline and building tools would have been a smarter way to go while still maintaining a smaller team.
“To start a new studio from scratch and to compete with the likes of EA and Activision and others, if you follow traditional development methodologies, you’re going to have to have five, six, seven hundred people,” he said. “We didn’t want to be that, we couldn’t afford that many people, and we didn’t believe that was the way to get to the right type of innovation and quality.”
“So when we started Embark, we spent the first seven to 10 months conceptualising ARC Raiders and most of the time we spent on production methodologies and building tools and pipelines to change the way games were being developed. With the ambition of being substantially faster in developing games, so that we could compete with these big publishers but with a substantially smaller team.”
Former CEO of parent company Nexon, Owen Mahoney, also commented on Embark Studios’ decision to focus on its developmental tools and production methodologies, noting that the studio was “super intentional” in its decision to not go for a big team too fast.
“You guys were super intentional in that if we have too big a team, it gets very hard to run, we can do a lot with software,” said Mahoney. “And you were also very clear that you wanted to build something different.”
In the same interview, Söderlund had also spoken about ARC Raiders‘ focus on fostering more friendly interactions between players rather than promoting competitive gameplay. He noted that this was the big reason behind features like leaderboards not coming to the extraction shooter.
“We’ve had several discussions about Nemesis systems and all types of things,” he said. “I don’t know where the team are on them right now. I think one of the beauties of this game is the fact that we don’t have those leaderboards, and it’s not competitive.”
“We don’t want to necessarily foster that type of gameplay. The game isn’t about shooting other players. You can do that if you want to, but the ethos of the game has never been to go in and shoot players. It’s a part that we use to craft tension.”
He also went into detail about the PvE roots of ARC Raiders, since that’s what the title was initially announced as, and discussed how adding other players to the same match helped a lot in creating and establishing a sense of tension.
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details.
