ARC Raiders has been a runaway success in recent weeks, but developer Embark Studios has released a new documentary video showing how it wasn’t always such a sure thing.
While the game was originally announced as a free-to-play title, early prototypes showed players picking Hero Shooter-like classes, leaping huge distances in a single bound, and working solely cooperatively to take down huge robots – no PvP in sight.
The video, narrated by Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer, highlights the struggles of the team to make a compelling prototype during the pandemic, and how it moved into the loot-driven extraction shooter we know today.
ARC Raiders fans should check out this new mini-documentary
With the game beginning life as a PvE shooter with co-op, Embark employed a plan called “The Pivot” in 2020, with a truncated development timeline of six months – something the studio presented, according to Caio Braga, Production Director, as a “Hail Mary”.
“We’d had what we called closed beta, and we realized what we had wasn’t really a viable thing, the game loop wasn’t there,” Virgil Watkins, Design Director explains.
“You’d have some sessions where you had an amazing moment, you loved it, and you never had anything like that in a game ever before, and then the following ten sessions you were running for 10 kilometres with nothing happening.”
Looking for something to “pull you back” to ARC Raiders, Founder and CEO Patrick Soderlund pushed for PvP, which was known internally as “The Reset”. This led to Embark’s other shooter, The Finals, being pushed forward.
The video is well worth a watch for anyone curious about how the game evolved over time. For what it’s worth, I was able to see a behind closed doors demo of the game at Gamescom a couple of years back, and it looked promising – but I didn’t think it would be as big as it is.
At the time of writing, ARC Raiders’ all-time peak was 481,966 on Steam alone, and it’s cresting close to that pretty regularly (thanks, SteamDB).
Last Updated On: Nov 24, 2025 12:00 pm CET