Following the kick-off of its PvE mode testing for ARC Raiders, Embark Studios has revealed that the company didn’t want to make the mode a full-fledged addition to the PvPvE extraction shooter without doing some research first. According to executive producer Aleksander Grøndal, the team decided to test its PvE mode out after noticing that ARC Raiders had already formed communities that don’t engage with PvP at all.
“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,” said Grøndal in an interview with GamesRadar. “We could see that group of people was consistently growing a little bit over the history of the game.”
It came down to “a group of, let’s call them dad gamers for lack of a better word”, who only tend to have “a couple of hours to play every now and then and just want to go out and complete some objectives.” This group of players, he notes, dislikes instances where they might get taken out by another better-equipped player who was simply camping an extraction point, and only prefers the PvE aspects of ARC Raiders.
“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.”
As for why the studio is just testing the PvE toggle out rather than making it a permanent addition to ARC Raiders right now, Grøndal said that Embark Studios wanted a better understanding of what the “dad gamer” demographic actually wants and needs.
“But at the same time, we didn’t want to commit to this fully before we fully understand what their actual needs are, hence the test,” he says. “I thought it was important that, let’s not just open the door and implement this solution. It might not be the answer to the question, and rather than just sitting and asking ourselves forever or designing an overly complicated feature to test it out, we went, OK, what is the obvious answer staring back at us? The matchmaking toggle test.
“That’s how it came to be, and we’re really excited to see the reception, what players think about that, as I’m sure we’ll take tons of learnings and then see how we can take those learnings into further developing what this could be – without making any promises, of course. I think that’s important to mention.”
The PvE toggle came following the recent Frozen Trail update, which also led to the title seeing almost 186,000 concurrent players on Steam. For more details about the update, check out our coverage. Also check out how there is a possibility that Embark might split PvE and PvPvE entirely.
