Coming from former Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront devs, Arc Raiders has a lot going for it already. The combination of team deathmatches with co-operative play through the gigantic robots stalking the maps makes the shooter stand out in a crowded market.
Although Embark Studios was founded by people who spent years working on some of the biggest FPS games, there are no guns involved in one of their largest influences. Early on, Shadow of the Colossus from Team Ico became a clear touchstone, and a high bar to aspire for.
"When you're inside a [large] studio, working with these established brands, there's just so much risk aversion," Patrick Söderlund, CEO of Embark, told Edge Magazine. "That mindset was shared between quite a few people inside DICE, having worked on many, many Battlefield titles. There just comes a time when you've done enough of those. We were all curious to see: what could we do, unconstrained?"
He and Embark's other founders kicked off their new venture with a meeting to figure out the kind of project they wanted to make. Realising they'd never actually discussed their favorite games before, because they'd all been too busy "staring down the iron sights of a gun" and making first-person shooters for over a decade, that seemed like a logical starting point. Shadow of the Colossus received unilateral praise and acknowledgement.
"There was something special about large-scale enemies," Söderlund says. "We said, 'If we're going to do robots, we want it to feel as innovative as Shadow Of The Colossus did when it came out', so that's when we started investing in machine learning and reinforcement learning."
Fumito Ueda's genre-bending monster-slaying action-adventure has been a standard-bearer for scale and methodical gameplay since it came out back in 2005. You can clearly see the influence in the gigantic, kaiju-like mechanical structures of Arc Raiders.
Coming from Battlefield, where destructible environments have long given the series a cinematic atmosphere, there’s huge potential here for a melding of ideas. I just hope it doesn't pack the emotional wallop of what happens to Wander at the end of Team Ico's masterpiece.
