Arc Raiders’ executive producer admits its developers ‘couldn’t keep pace with the players’ and their need for content, but promises Frozen Trail as the answer
If there’s one thing you should never underestimate, it’s a gamer’s love for completing little tasks. Whether it’s battle passes, meaningless fetch quests, or in Arc Raiders’ case, its expeditions. There’s just the right amount of dopamine involved for a neuron activation, so you best bet that they’ll rip through them at an unthinkable speed.
I’ll concede that Embark Studios probably couldn’t have foreseen the full extent of this love prior to Arc Raiders release, but still, the outcome is the same: gamers out-growing their once-beloved game because they managed to complete all their tasks way too fast.
“We didn’t really expect that amount of players to show up and play ARC Raiders,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains in an interview with GamesBeat. “That surprised us. We were a bit unprepared. That’s one of the hard lessons we had to learn. When January came and some of the problems started with the game.”
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January saw the first crack in Arc Raiders’ armour, as the novelty began to wear off and players became more keenly aware of how limited its content was alongside growing concerns about cheating and stream sniping. Unfortunately, despite some hard work from the team, the latter two points still remain contentious.
“We have very dedicated people playing the game,” Grøndal adds. “We had some challenges around how much content there is in the game, how much progression there is in the game. We had some, but the players wanted more.
“We bet on trying to update it fast and giving players more things to do over time. That was our strategy, to try to meet those demands from players. The issue with that was the team just couldn’t keep pace with the players. The players grew frustrated, because some of the things we shipped were perhaps not as good or as meaningful as they were hoping. That was another awakening for us.”
Embark has been very upfront about how its dev team errs on the smaller side for a live service game, which means it just couldn’t keep pace with competitors like Call of Duty, Overwatch, or even Valorant, all of which have enough employees to keep the content mills constantly churning.
The issue with that was the team just couldn’t keep pace with the players.
Aleksander Grøndal
As live service games have become more common, each one is competing with others for the industry’s gold dust: player attention. But Grøndal concedes that “this is the challenge with running a live service” and that Embark can’t “beat anyone on quantity”. Instead, the goal has always been to provide players with higher quality stuff that “has the Embark finesse to it.”
The issue with quality over quantity is that players actually really like quantity. Many will say that they prefer for stuff to look good, but that’s not really a live service game’s draw, instead its draw is to provide something for players to do whenever they want. Players were promised a 10-year plan, and they haven’t seen that manifest in Arc Raiders yet.
So what’s the solution? A better anti-cheat would be a good start, but really, Arc Raiders just needs to find its footing and get back to a good live service cadence if it wants to bring players back. As for when this could happen, it seems like Embark is gearing up for something of a comeback in October with its upcoming Frozen Trails major update.
Grøndal has said it will bring a rank redesign, more arcs, updates to storage, and a new map as it tries “to answer a lot of those questions that have been posed to us from a mechanical and content perspective.”
But until then, all players can do is wait and have some hope that better things are to come.
