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Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios is actively discussing the game's late spawn system, which frequently drops raiders into active raids with roughly 17 to 25 minutes remaining. The system serves an essential purpose, design lead Virgil Watkins says, but it also "really sucks" to have no time for your intended objective.
We've all been there. You've loaded your Equalizer and packed your Deadline mines. It's time to kill the Queen. Oh, wait, you're 800 meters away from the Queen's Harvester, there are 18 minutes left in the raid, and you can hear the Queen actively exploding from here, freshly slain by the folks who spawned in with the full 30 minutes. Back to Speranza it is.
This can happen with many objectives, whether it's a weekly trial to damage Rocketeers or a chain of quest locations on the other side of the map. If you join too late, your plans may be totally upended by the invisible hand of Embark.
"That's also another topic we've been discussing a lot," Watkins tells GamesRadar+, "and it's another one of those interesting things of data versus perception. We 100% acknowledge the whole thing of, 'Man, I came in to do that trial and now I clearly don't have enough time to do that, and that sucks, so I'm just going to leave,' or whatever. That aspect is definitely not great.
"But similar to the perception of free kits versus what they do, the perception around late joining and what it affords you has been quite interesting. Players are like, 'The loot's all gone,' or whatever else. But players who late join economically profit way more than people who aren't. The session, when they are fresh, does eventually get quieter, and very often they come across the remnants of fights or can maybe take out bigger drones or hit high-ticket areas more readily than other players. So that's been a very interesting thing to look at."
Part of the "original intent with the late join system," Watkins affirms, was to prevent raids from emptying out after roughly 10 minutes. Otherwise you'd then be "running around by yourself, effectively," which would kill the suspense and danger present in full lobbies. It helps raids stay fresh longer, basically.
Embark had hoped for players who join late to think, "'Okay, well my plan A isn't possible. I'm gonna do my plan B or C now instead.'" To that end, Watkins says "the amount of loot we spawn, where it's spawned, where the spawn points are – it's all set up in a way that there should be plenty of stuff for players to do."
Pivots like that are sometimes possible. On a late spawn, I might rush the closest loot zone for scrap and get out, or more readily attack other players who (at least in my mind) have already looted the containers I was initially planning to plunder. But especially during limited-time events like the Queen's Harvester, or in raids where you were planning to use a key to open a specific loot room, a late raid can feel like a wasted one. It's here that Embark is apparently considering ways to reduce frustration with late spawns.
"With things like trials, where that is the only objective, then fine, that's kind of off the table and that really sucks, because that was the time you had set aside for it," Watkins agrees. "I think trying to do more on that side of things is where I want to look next. Coming in with a dedicated purpose and that's been undercut by the late join is where I'd want to remove the pain point first."
