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In December, CEO Patrick Söderlund of Embark Studios discussed the latent potential of player trading in Arc Raiders and how future updates could lean into this element of interaction. According to design lead Virgil Watkins, the studio actually "partially built" a more robust trade system at one point in Arc Raiders' development, and though it was ultimately removed, there's still ambition to make trading a more fun and social part of the game.
For clarity, here's what Söderlund said: "We should do more with the trading part of the game. Also, allow people to trade amongst each other, etc. I think it's fun. We absolutely have to look at it long term. We haven't decided on anything yet, but that's the fun part of building something like this. This is really the start of something, and there are so many things that we can look into adding to the game."
Some players began to wonder if Arc Raiders might one day add a player market space or even an MMO or action RPG-style auction house. Speaking with GamesRadar+, Watkins supports and adds some detail to Söderlund's comments (which the CEO shared while actively playing Arc Raiders with Games Beat), and puts some related concerns to rest.
"I think that's more an expression of what someone finds fun than intent," Watkins says of the trading discussion. "We're not building an auction house or anything like that. Currently, I think it's more leaning into the aspect of social facilitation in that sense of our design.
"One thing we really wanted to do, and may still try to do, is: it's fine to trade by just dropping something on the floor, and you can pick it up, but we really want to do an offer where you hold it out and someone actually interacts with the thing in your hand to take it from you," he continues. "And it's kind of a small thing, but it feels a lot better than, 'Here's your thing I threw on the floor for you.' So I think it's things on those ends."
A traditional video game auction house, where players sell and buy items to and from other players using listing offers anchored in specified amounts of in-game currency, is "very risky territory," Watkins says.
A push too far in this direction may undermine "one of the core game loops" of Arc Raiders – going to certain areas of different maps in search of specific items for progression or crafting – so Embark is being very cautious with anything remotely like it. Anyone who's played an MMO with a similar system can probably tell you the same thing: without distinct objectives and resources that make individual activities uniquely worthwhile, everything might be distilled down to a more boring question of gold (or coins) per hour. (I think it's much more fun to hunt down exactly the items you need the old-fashioned way, and then daisy chain those hunts together.)
"We put a lot of very, very deliberate effort into making the game about the items," Watkins affirms. "We previously explored and even partially built a trading system like [an auction house]. But what it ended up doing is it turned the game into just being about coins. Going in and finding items that are worth the most value, changing them in [for coins], and just buying the things you want. Now you have very little care about going in, exploring the correct location, and searching the right containers, or feeling cool that, 'Oh, finally, I needed this thing, and now I can go do the other thing I wanted to do with it.'"
Just imagine: all those rusted gears, medical kits, laboratory reagents, and epic Arc cores wouldn't mean nearly as much if you could just shovel a bunch of Mullein or gun parts into a big money furnace to buy them outright.
