"If you're trying to send people to Mars, you're going to crash a bunch of rockets. We crashed a bunch of rockets": Arc Raiders devs explain how failed ideas led to one of 2025's biggest hits

Like pretty much any game, the development of Arc Raiders wasn't a smooth ride. In fact, the entire PvE game that was shown off years ago was almost entirely scrapped in favor of the extraction shooter we have now, but developers at Embark Studios explain how failed ideas led to finding the fun.

"We spent the majority of our first year just building tools," founder and CEO Patrick Soderlund said in a new developer documentary about the making of one of 2025's biggest hits. "I also knew that we weren't going to get things right. We were going to make a ton of mistakes along the way and we had to plan for those mistakes, and kind of get ourselves in a cushion to be able to make those mistakes."

The Embark head explains it quite succinctly here: "Guess what? If you're trying to send people to Mars, you will crash a bunch of rockets. We crashed a bunch of rockets."

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Technical designer Nora Silow remembers that one of the earliest concepts she worked on was a "four-legged little pouncing" dog that would run around the map. It's "long gone," of course, as are many other ideas.

Paul Greveson, senior technical artist, elaborated that "sometimes ideas written down on paper" don't hold up when implemented into the game itself. "It sounded really cool when we were talking about it, but actually, now, I'm just running around looking up all the time."

"Finding the fun isn't always a thing that you cannot just automatically say, 'We'll just do this and it will be fun'", executive producer Aleksander Grondal explained. "What you know is: you work and you put the thing in and it's not working like you want it to. So, then, you need to start reworking it and reiterating on it and maybe rethinking some of your initial assumptions… That comes from playing the game and playing around with what you've created."

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