"It's a slippery slope to try and build a game for an audience": Marathon, Arc Raiders, and Last Flag devs dig into the trend-bucking evolution of multiplayer shooters

Multiplayer shooters evolve slowly but surely. The sweaty arena shooters of yesteryear paved the way for big-budget franchises to thrive, and while they reigned supreme, hero shooters and once-niche battle royale games birthed today's live service formula. Now another door is opening, with Arc Raiders and Marathon successfully taking the hardcore stylings and RPG-esque progression from extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov to far broader audiences.

It's a very exciting time to enjoy multiplayer shooters, but why is so much changing? I caught up with three studios across the industry – Bungie (Marathon), Embark Studios (Arc Raiders), and Night Street Games (Last Flag) – to learn more about their priorities, creative interests, and thoughts on working within one of the industry's riskiest genres.

Collateral damage

The term 'Extraction shooter' boils the subgenre down to one facet – getting out alive. But equally important to the niche is RPG-style progression and smart blending of PvP and PvE, while time limits ensure it all works within the framework of a traditional session-based multiplayer shooter.

Over the last year, we've seen both Arc Raiders and Marathon offer their own spins on the formula. While Arc Raiders relies upon the unpredictability of player encounters, Marathon leans further into the genre's hardcore shooter roots, with PvP driven by sudden violence and exceptionally low time-to-kill (TTK). Yet both games emphasize PvE, with players forced to reckon with AI-controlled enemies as often as other players.

For Virgil Watkins, the design director for Arc Raiders, blending PvE and PvP is all about fostering unpredictability. "You’re not just designing around AI encounters or player-versus-player competition in isolation but rather creating situations where those systems interact. That’s where there’s a lot of possibility for memorable moments, because there are enough free agents to affect the situation in many ways.

"That was a big part of what drew us in that direction with Arc Raiders," he adds. The game was originally more of a "PvE co-op experience" which, despite some charm, Watkins admits "lacked any pull to keep coming back to play more than a few times". Now, Arc Raiders' robots are just one of the game's agents of chaos – PvP-minded raiders see them as proximity alarms to be avoided lest they give away their position to other players, while more trusting folk can team up with random players to take down tougher robots for better rewards. "That tension found when cooperation can shift into competition (or vice versa) is what makes each encounter feel unique [...] That flexibility has been really important in creating those player-driven stories we've seen emerge" says Watkins.

Joe Ziegler, creative director for Marathon, describes the approach as a "recipe for infinite stories and experiences," echoing Watkins' thoughts on unpredictability. "I like to think of classic stories of adventure like The Lord of the Rings when thinking about games like this," he says. "You can imagine the journey of Frodo and the Fellowship would have been way less interesting and suspenseful if all they encountered was dangerous wildlife on the way to Mount Doom and didn’t have other enemies out there, unpredictably trying to steal the ring or end their journey."

Ziegler's Lord of the Rings comparison is apt for another reason. There's been an increasing focus on storytelling in successful multiplayer shooters of late, ranging from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2's breakout co-op campaign to Helldivers 2's emergent tales of heroism.

Like Helldivers 2, Marathon and Arc Raiders feature plenty of emergence – not always as well-intentioned – and boast exceptional worldbuilding. I fell for Marathon's corpo-dystopian vibes long before getting to grips with its brutal PvP flow, and will forever applaud Arc Raiders' commitment to immersion. Perhaps the ever-scant campaign offerings of franchise multiplayer shooters has created an appetite for substance, or maybe we just want to lean into the stakes.

Bungie spent a great deal of time ensuring Marathon's futuristic corporations – or at least, their AI representatives – felt believable. "We have a lot of teams that work very closely together to coalesce around features," says Julia Nardin, Marathon's creative director. "Once we’d aligned on what factions and contracts needed to do from a gameplay standpoint, we created cross-disciplinary groups to develop their identities and in-game presentation at the same time we were working on designing the contracts themselves. We encouraged those groups to take some pretty big swings and get as weird with it as they wanted, which led to questions like: “What if the Sekiguchi Genetics rep looked like a giant WEAVEworm?”

Shoot for the heart

It's hard to pinpoint the last time the multiplayer shooter genre felt so alive. Ziegler believes its fans "evolve and change just like the games they play," and suggests many want "immersive and dynamic" experiences akin to Marathon and Arc Raiders.

Yet finding success isn't guaranteed. Live service games are hard to launch and keep alive, and shooters are no exception. Sony's 2024 hero shooter Concord was launched and subsequently shut down within two weeks due to poor sales, with the publisher closing Firewalk Studio just one month later.

Raid shooter Highguard was revealed at The Game Awards 2025 and released in January 2026, but despite being revealed on one of the industry's biggest platforms, couldn't reach "a sustainable player base" and was shuttered in March following layoffs. Amidst it all, layoffs and downsizing continue to lash the game industry, and it's common to see hawkish discussions around multiplayer games focus not on their creative merits, but player counts.

Still, that doesn't stop studios from taking their shot. Brothers Mac and Dan Reynolds, of Imagine Dragons fame, founded Night Street Games in 2020 and have just launched their debut game: Last Flag, a 5v5 Capture the Flag shooter. Speaking just before launch, I ask Mac how the genre's latest highs and lows have affected the team's artistic vision or morale.

"It’s a slippery slope to try and build a game for an audience, and I really don’t think it’s how the best games – or art in general – are made," he says. "You absolutely want to listen to your players when you develop, but the creative core has to be what inspires you and your team, or it won’t have soul and you’ll burn out trying to force it into existence. So although we aren’t blind to what happens around us with other games, we really try to protect the team’s freedom to build without trying to think about other hits and misses when it comes to creative vision.

"But if there’s one takeaway I’d take from the shooter landscape in the last few years, it’s that players will still jump in and play something new – even a shooter in an already popular subgenre – if it brings something to the table that’s different and exciting for them," he adds, pointing to Last Flag's own playful reimagining of Capture the Flag. "It’s not like anything else out there, for better or worse. And we hope people will jump in and give it a try for that reason."

Echoing Reynolds' philosophy, Watkins says Arc Raiders wasn't an attempt to "break into a particular type of shooter or follow a trend," and points once more to its highly iterative development cycle. Similarly, Reynolds admits that "making a multiplayer shooter was never actually the goal" for Last Flag. "In our early prototypes, we tested a lot of different capture the flag concepts. We tried top down and isometric views, fog of war, and lots of other ideas that never made the final cut. Eventually we found that a third person multiplayer shooter was the right vehicle for our game loop, and that took us where we are today. But even now, we consider ourselves to be Capture the Flag first and shooter second – which dictates a lot of choices we’ve made in gameplay."

Although the image of a full-to-bursting shooter scene is daunting to some, Watkins says the Arc Raiders team "see it as a positive" for the genre.

"It raises the bar in a good way," he offers. "When there’s more variety and more high-quality experiences out there, it pushes everyone to be more thoughtful about what they’re building and why. It also brings more players into the genre, which ultimately benefits all of us. So we tend to look at it as a rising tide. If players are excited about shooters and the various experiences they can offer, that’s a good thing. It creates more space for different kinds of games to exist and find their audience."

Speaking to the developers behind Last Flag, Marathon, and Arc Raiders turns up much in common. None have shied away from dramatic iteration, nor felt beholden to meet expectations set by other games. Indeed, trend-chasing in itself seems increasingly futile. Spiralling development times all but guarantee reaching the market late, while the longevity of live service games means the audience they serve is unlikely to move on for anything too similar.

"When it comes to live service, the bar is extremely high," says Watkins. "Players already have established games they’ve invested a lot of time in, so anything new really has to earn its place [...] If you can create an experience that feels engaging, approachable, and has room for players to make it their own, then there’s space for it, even alongside long-running games."

Where will the genre go from here? Right now, it's hard to tell: mainstream extraction shooters are still in their infancy, and it remains to be seen whether their integration of PvPvE will inspire more developers to experiment with the dynamic. Perhaps we'll see a broader, stranger smorgasbord of games that let us shoot friends. Perhaps the next big thing is already here; the military sim (mil-sim) genre, for example, has a thriving audience and seems well-positioned to welcome fans who seek a grittier experience.

There's no secret ingredient to making a hit, but approaching each creative endeavor with an authentic desire to find the fun, as obvious as that may sound, is more foundational than many seem to realize. Arc Raiders continues to make big changes ahead of its first anniversary in September, while Marathon is already eyeing the long game – Bungie knows "where we want to take the story over the next few years," Nardin tells me. For Reynolds, Last Flag's success will not be measured by how many people play it.

"We’ve already achieved the most important thing we could control, which is making a game we love and are proud of as a team," he says. "I know it sounds trite, but it’s a massive blessing to be able to do something as fun as build a video game. To bring a game to completion with people you care about in a way that you have no real regrets about, that is a gift. Whatever happens next, there’s real beauty and satisfaction there."

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