At one point during the development of hit shooter Arc Raiders, Embark Studios wanted to have big boss fights centred around pattern recognition in the same vein as Dark Souls or Monster Hunter, but the imposing robots that stalk the game's maps were far too unpredictable for that to work.
Arc Raiders' technical designer Nora Silow said as much in a docuseries about the making of the extraction shooter, which you can watch below. "A lot of design philosophies, especially with enemy design, are really difficult to pull off when you have these types of systems because it's so much about pattern recognition," she said.
For those out of the loop, pattern recognition in games is pretty much what the name implies. When you see a Dark Souls boss stretch their weapon in a specific way, let's say, you'll eventually realize they're charging up for a very particular spinning attack, and hopefully, you'll also in time realize how to counter it.
"That's what games like Dark Souls, like Monster Hunter kind of rely upon," Silow continued. "And we had this ambition to have boss fights in that same arena of Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, having all of that compelling pattern recognition."
But Embark soon realized the Arcs had far too many variables for those more scripted boss encounters to be viable. Pattern recognition works in games because the player knows that certain animations will lead to certain outcomes almost every single time, which doesn't really work if a scarab-y Arc is on a slope at an angle the developers didn't plan for or if there's another player firing from an unexpected angle.
Silow puts it succinctly: "You're not gonna have the pattern that you thought."
Arc Raiders players exploited the Hidden Bunker so hard that Embark has turned it off entirely
