Arc Raiders lead dispels conspiracy theory that the robots are somehow learning how to kill us better: "That's just us in the way we author them"

Since Arc Raiders launched in late October 2025, there's been a growing belief the eponymous drones are actively learning about how players work. Anecdotes have been bandied around of them seemingly becoming smarter about their targeting and movement. Well, sorry to break this to you, but that's just how they've been designed.

Virgil Watkins, design director on Arc Raiders, explains this to PC Gamer in a new interview. "That's just us in the way we author them," he says. "The machine learning is literally only for teaching them to walk and navigate the environment. It doesn't do any of their behaviors or their attacks or anything like that."

Don't feel too bad if you really did believe the Arcs were starting to cop on to how players operate, as Embark's put some legwork into video game AI. Tom Solberg, a machine learning software engineer at the studio, wrote a pretty in-depth piece once on how this tech is changing how the devs approach movement.

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This, plus numerous incidents of seeing Arcs act in unexpected ways, and you've got the makings of a strong hypothesis. But it appears the team keeps combat and navigation separate, making them disparate wings of the same, terrifying mechanical menace that trawls the map endlessly yearning for your demise.

Necessity might be a driving force for that. Since the maps are static, they're programming the Arcs to read data that has limited variables. Meanwhile, for these things to register player behavior, you've an unholy number of variables to try and account for, and since this is live-service, you really don't want your in-game adversaries to be acting too unexpectedly.

Arc Raiders "needs that element of tension and risk" from PvP to work, dev says, even though Embark knows people are loving its "safer lobbies"