Join The Community
Given its popularity, it's easy to imagine Arc Raiders engaging in all sorts of crossovers for skins ala Fortnite or Call of Duty. However, developer Embark Studios is keen to keep everything within reason for the universe, regardless of how the game continues to expand.
"First and foremost, we want to make sure that everything fits the fiction of Arc Raiders," Patrick Söderlund, CEO at Embark, tells IGN. "There are other games, very successful games out there - The Finals being one of them – in which the IP is designed so it basically happens to be very elastic. You can do whatever the hell you want."
The Finals is, of course, Embark's first game, an FPS where matches take place in a VR arena, allowing for any kind of customization. But as IP collaborations become increasingly commonplace, Arc Raiders wants to be more in line with Battlefield 6 in trying to work from its own template.
"Arc Raiders has a more curated lore, curated world, so we have to stick within boundaries slightly to a different extent than maybe The Finals or Fortnite or another game in which Batman can shoot Bart Simpson," he says. "That's not the vision for our game."
Fortnite is the extreme end of this, featuring entire seasons centred around other properties and turning skins into a toy collection of sorts. Many other games, such as Destiny 2 or Hitman, vary in how big the collabs ultimately are.
According to Söderlund, what we've seen so far is "the start of the Arc Raiders lore," and there'll be experimentation on what it means to sit within the walls of Speranza and wander the robot-infested lands topside.
"Some things just need to be OG - if there's such a thing as that spot in the middle of what Arc Raiders is - but we also need to build things that are on the fringe of what the lore and IP can tolerate without them being a pink banana," he adds.
