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Spend enough time in Arc Raiders maps like Blue Gate and you're sure to notice some abnormally large, amusingly Tick-like Arc roaming in the background. Where the Queen and Matriarch are imposing mobile fortresses, these background Arc are basically mountains with legs – impossibly gargantuan machines. I don't think an Anvil is gonna cut it. Developer Embark Studios doesn't seem ready to drop something of this size on us just yet, but it is cooking up some new Arc to make PvE feel dangerous as players master the current suite of robots.
Speaking with GamesRadar+, design lead Virgil Watkins examines the current endgame loop with Arc: kill Queens and Matriarchs to craft guns that excel at killing Queens and Matriarchs.
"I think we are pretty happy with what they are now, but I don't think we can subsist forever on that," he says. "I think eventually, if we introduce yet another six-legged giant spidery robot, it's kind of like, 'Okay, we got it.' So yeah, I think it's looking toward where we take those types of experiences in the future to something else or something additional, seeing how we can escalate the experience for the player on the PvE side.
"Especially because we've seen – as players get more advanced with the game, more sophisticated in their approach, or they just understand how to play better – the current set of drones becomes much less of a threat to them. They've figured out their attack patterns and how to avoid them, or how to deal with them quickly and things like that. So I think continuing to escalate that is where we're looking at growing next."
This framing essentially splits Arc into two groups: the everyday harassers you see on a regular basis, and special ones that only come out for events like Matriarch assaults. Embark is looking at both groups, but on the higher end, there's just one little problem with dropping those mountain-roamers into a map: the game might explode.
"That is the challenge," Watkins says of titanic Arc bosses. "We want to go wherever's practical for us, or wherever feels fun, but then you start running into the practical side of, will this blow up the server? Can it even support these kinds of things? Our ambitions are definitely large, and I'm not going to say that you're going to meet one anytime soon, but obviously you see the giant walking ones in the background and stuff. That's what we're trying to show some contrast with as we go forward."
Down here in the reasonably sized realm, Embark is "looking at things like – we use the term variants – but it's like, what does this look like with an adjustment to its attack pattern, or weapon loadout, or armor, or things like that. So we can create distinct gameplay changes while using the platforms we have, but trying to avoid just being like, 'Oh, they painted the Wasp blue, and here it is.' So we want to be a little careful about that. Not to say that simple variants don't have their place, but we want to make sure that they are actually serving a purpose in the ecosystem we have."
Watkins was very clear on the future of the newest Arc, Shredders, which have been confined to Stella Montis thus far. He mentions that they are "currently" only in this one map, which sounds like a threat to me.
"I think it is a promise," he says. "They'll figure out how to get out of there eventually."
