Arc Raiders has never been more dangerous. Embark Studios dropped its big Flashpoint update right at the end of March, and it has hit players like four surprise plates added to their squat barbell. Arc Raiders is hard now – or hard again, really, with Flashpoint escalating a game that had teeth in the early days but has long felt solved. In its difficulty and quality-of-life changes, Flashpoint is a major step forward, and it's right in line with Embark's goal of keeping players on their toes.
After his GDC talk about Arc Raiders' messy production pivots, production director Caio Braga spoke to GamesRadar+ about how Embark's development and launch experiences are guiding its future plans. A dominant theme emerged in our discussion: players should not feel safe, no matter how hard they try to tilt odds in their favor with friendly behavior and matchmaking.
I asked Braga about his thoughts on the emergence of so-called Care Bear lobbies, where many players default to, and even expect, friendliness toward other raiders. "Even in those servers, I hope they don't feel fully safe," he responds. "I guess that's the real quote here. Players shouldn't feel fully safe. There's always Arc in their way. We never promised that they will be on full friendly lobbies. And humans, right? They can sometimes surprise you, backstab you, or abuse your generosity. There's all of that that we want to keep existing in this game. So finding a complete break where it's only PvE is probably something we don't want to explore at the moment, because we want you to not feel safe."
Flashpoint once again demonstrates how PvE challenges can collide with PvP to ramp up that danger. New hotspots crawling with Arc and stuffed with rare loot draw in players and summon legions of Arc, creating waves of interaction and possibility. Do you bum rush the facilities and hope to retreat with full pockets before the Arc can really tear the place up? Do you sit back and watch other players do the hard work and then borrow their loot by kindly escorting them back to Speranza? Can you actually afford to attack other players and risk bringing the Arc down on your head? Even in the friendliest lobbies around, death is everywhere post-Flashpoint, and at some point, just looking out for yourself feels hard enough.
Braga examines the perceived gap between the two extreme player types: Care Bears and cutthroats. People reluctant to shoot even a single raider, and people who aren't satisfied until they've downed about 10.
"I think what the community brings is quite interesting," he begins, "especially the space we are right now where we have those, I wouldn't call them opposite, but polar audiences, I think, is a good way to put it in our game. We're trying to hear the community and understand their problems without having to understand, too much, their solutions, because they don't see each other very well. When you're playing as a PvP player, you care about your experience, right? We care about everyone's experience and how much fun they can have in the game. So I think that's what changed a lot, the community aspect of it, how we can see through all of the feedback and identify the main problems."
He touches on a fairly universal truth in games, and it's one you'll hear from a lot of developers: players are great at identifying problems, but often bad at proposing solutions to them. Not just because our technical perspective as players is extremely limited as far as what's feasible or reasonable, but also because we can really only assess our own personal experience. In Arc Raiders, which aims for a PvPvE experience but has devout camps of both PvP and PvE enthusiasts flanking that middle ground, it's especially easy to favor your own playstyle at the expense of someone else's fun.
The good news, Braga suggests, is that "the middle ground is much bigger" than those two polarized audiences. "Those two poles are a bit more vocal, I would say," he continues. "So we have that, the mass of players in between those two things. We see some trends of players who PvP and start to lose too much that go more Care Bear. And the opposite: Care Bears start to get a lot of riches and go PvP. So there is all of that. I think that what we see a lot is the two poles being opinionated, which is very good for us, because we end up getting feedback."
Playing aggressively but resorting to quiet, stealthy looting after a losing streak? It absolutely couldn't be me.
