Ahead of the March 31 Arc Raiders Flashpoint update, some longtime players seem to be drifting away from the game a bit, or at least approaching their fill of what it currently has to offer.
The game's still doing incredibly well, of course, and plenty of players are as hooked as ever. Monthly content drops and weekly patches have extended the road, but devs can never make content as fast as people consume it, so some hardcore players with hundreds of hours logged may be feeling repetition setting in after the second Expedition reset. This came up passively during our recent interview with Arc Raiders production director Caio Braga, who discusses Embark's problem-solving process and keeping an eye on endgame players.
Speaking with GamesRadar+ at GDC, Braga explains that Embark still uses roughly the same triage process compared to what he described in his panel about the game's tumultuous development: identifying the top three problems, top 10 improvements, and the stuff that's already good enough.
"We do use the same [process]," he says. "When we did the reset, it was the whole team, right? We were 25 people. So it's easier to say, these are the top problems. We're 120 [now], so what happens is, it's just spread a little bit more. It's not the whole team. It's more like a problem goes to the UX team. They do the same, but it's for UX. So the top three problems, top 10 improvements, and what's good enough, we sign off together and then they start to work on the problem solving. Sometimes we say this problem is general, every team has to contribute, so it's a bit different because of the size, where it's basically multiplying that for the five internal teams."
This reactive process exists "in parallel" to the development of big content drops, Braga says. I asked him about today's top problems, and after jokingly replying "the Il Toro" on reflex (it's been giga-nerfed), he gets into topline issues.
"Balancing is always, not really a problem, but something we keep top of mind all the time," he says. "That is one thing. It's all new to us, the live environment with this amount of players. We've been trying to identify what are the most impactful updates we can give to players. There are a few things that we see that are more engaging and some others less engaging, and because we're not a huge team, optimizing for that impact is something that we are learning and trying to do better and better in every update."
To this end, Braga says Embark wants to punch up the danger and difficulty of the game. "A lot, actually," he says. "It is one of the things we want to keep working on. We want to challenge the players. Especially the players that are reaching the end of our content. We want more for them. I want them to have more to do, and because they are at the end of it, it's also important that we challenge them more and more. It is something we want to continue doing, but always giving players tools as well so that other players can partake of the fun."
I asked about Arc Raiders' mystery ships and a dev told me the same thing Embark is now teasing online: "I think you'll have to keep an eye on the sky for now."
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