Enough monkeys and a typewriter will produce Shakespeare, and enough gamers and a loot economy will produce exploits. Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios felt this firsthand as it watched millions of players discover and disseminate ways to access loot hotspots normally gated behind rare keycards by – checks notes – running into a corner really hard. This was not on the studio's bingo card, it turns out, and it wasn't the only surprise.
Speaking with PC Gamer, art director Robert Sammelin says, "There are quite a few things that have taken us by surprise." You can only do so much testing internally, and your own team's enthusiasm for loot may not match the bottomless hunger of tempted gamers. (Our Arc Raiders loot cheat sheet will help you with that, the legitimate way.)
"Other things are sort of more or less known, because we have to continuously find ways to waterproof the experience and figure out how to mitigate anything that is either generally damaging exploits or just general bugs," Sammelin says.
Sammelin says "we've tested and tried out a lot of things throughout the years," but to "see the players utilising especially the physicality of a game like this" is "genuinely surprising." It's "mostly delightful things," he says, watching how players have worked out and expanded on corner cases that Embark did identify in testing, but equally there's been a wealth of unexpected directions.
Just recently, Embark fixed a wealth of out-of-bounds glitches which grew in popularity after the usual wallhacks were stopped (by filling illegally accessed rooms with flamethrowers, might I add). It's like the arms race between hackers and anticheat: close one backdoor and another pops up.
