Arc Raiders is finally trying out a PvE-only mode, and it's gone exactly as you'd expect. After the limited-time release of a PvE toggle, fierce opinions have hit the game's community faster than Bastion bullets to my temple after I misclick my photoelectric cloak, and the test has only just begun. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal tells me that, inside developer Embark Studios, similar debates about a PvE mode raged, but the team decided the "dad gamers" deserve a fair shot.
At the risk of splitting the game in two, Embark chose to finally bite the bullet after realizing that players had practically done the legwork for them.
"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," Grøndal observes. "We could see that group of people was consistently growing a little bit over the history of the game."
Grøndal tips his hat to "a group of, let's call them dad gamers for lack of a better word" who are the imagined casual gamer made manifest. They have "a couple of hours to play every now and then and just want to go out and complete some objectives. 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."
You can see how simply this PvE toggle was done. Almost immediately, players started to poke holes in this trial implementation of PvE Arc Raiders, griefing loot and bullying Arc who were unprepared to face raiders who have nothing else to shoot at. If Embark does decide to make PvE mode a permanent option in the future, it would want some finer tuning. And after plenty of debate inside the studio, with many developers echoing concerns around tension and the loot economy and difficulty, Grøndal reckons those decisions are better off informed by live data.
"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."
