Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios has yet to come out and say that a permanent PvE mode is coming to the game, but we're certainly hearing more and more rumblings in that direction.
In a new interview with The Game Business, Embark CEO turned Nexon games chief Patrick Söderlund joined Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal to discuss, among other things, the reception to the game's recent PvE mode test.
For a limited time, players could opt into PvE-only rounds of Arc Raiders to enjoy the game's world without the risk of another raider gunning them down. Reception seemed mixed but overall positive, and it seems Embark is warming up to the idea of PvE as a whole. Importantly, the studio has also reaffirmed that it wouldn't be a hard thing to add.
"We could just frankly add PvE," says Söderlund. "It's not a difficult thing for us to do, but we didn't want to obstruct or fiddle too much with the core loop of the game. The PvP aspect of a PvP PvE game does add, we believe, adequate tension."
Maintaining the intrigue and threat baked into Arc Raiders is part of the hesitance to commit to PvE, especially given Arc Raiders' origins as a PvE-only game that pivoted to extraction PvP following troubled production.
While Embark previously felt this type of radical change to the "emotional loop" of Arc Raiders is "maybe not the right thing to do," Söderlund continues, "we've now since tried it and realized that it's fun. Why not have it? You know, maybe people can choose what they like."
"People may have been wondering, 'Why the hell aren't they just doing what some players were looking for?' We were looking at the holistic picture, which we have to do, and the whole of the game to also protect the creative integrity of what we have created, what we aspire to build, and what the game should be according to us."
Here, too, live service development complicates things. The Arc Raiders community is so big, Söderlund reasons, that "we can't ignore the PvE camp" completely. The goal now is to "do a good enough job to cater to all the player types without watering down the overall experience."
Grøndal agrees that PvE could potentially fit into the game. He cites the popularity of the PvE test: almost 50% of games played during the test were PvE. That is a huge number, and while some people did "change their mind" about PvE being fun, you do "have players who absolutely loved it."
Again, he comes back to PvE not hurting "the integrity of the experience itself." This is where, beyond the apparently simple technical implementation, the broader implications of PvE are likely more complicated – economy, population, servers, event design, and so on.
