It’s about us trying to keep the spirit of those [events], but adjust the mechanics.
Virgil Watkins
While extraction shooters are typically a PvP-focused bloodbath, Arc Raiders breaks that mould. One of the best examples of this is how the PvE boss fights, the Matriarch and Queen, are almost like raid encounters that encourage players to work together.
Virgil Watkins
Watkins joined Embark Studios as a senior technical designer in October 2021, going on to serve as Arc Raiders’ design director since February 2022.
Nevertheless, after speaking with Arc Raiders’ design director, Virgil Watkins, it’s clear that Embark understands how these boss fights are falling short currently. (Internally, they’re actually called ‘encounters’ rather than boss fights, due to the expectations that come with the word boss).
“Even though [Queens and Matriarchs are] huge and deadly, they’re not intended for the full server to go up against and get equally rewarded. It is meant to be, you know, a couple of dedicated squads, maybe working together while also dealing with other players,” Waktins explains. For anyone who’s seen a Matriarch killed four minutes into the start of the match by a Pink Floyd-style light show of Equaliser fire, the problem is pretty clear.
“That’s definitely on us to an extent … I think we gave players too effective abilities to take down these things too early. So they were tuned more for what I would call mid-game gear.” The problem comes, then, when the boss goes down super fast, nobody kills each other, and then there isn’t enough loot to go around.
However, it’s evidently not as simple as just tweaking damage numbers to make these elite Arcs more tanky. Embark’s intention for these encounters is to enable different playstyles: “Do we reward the people who might pick their moment well, and go get some scraps from part of the fight and then sneak away? … Are you going to be the guy who capitalises at the end of the fight because everyone’s worn down and out of ammo, or are you the one who’s trying to pull everyone together and have the fight on even terms?”
Arguably even more problematic in terms of design are the Locked Gate and Hidden Bunker events, which actively incentivise players to avoid completing the map conditions—finding keys and activating antennae—because it’s more rewarding to camp the closed entrance and wait for it to unlock. Why take the risk of running around the map when you could just chill at the door? (Interestingly, this is a great example of a real economics conundrum called the ‘free-rider problem’, again underlining that Arc Raiders is really a social experiment.)
In the case of Hidden Bunker and Locked Gate, Watkins agrees that they are a “good use case for where revisions [are] probably required
“When we built them, we had an idealised way we hoped people would engage. And then, you know, as players always do, they find this sort of meta throughline,” he explains, “that’s where we can go look at those existing map conditions … it’s about us trying to keep the spirit of those, but adjust the mechanics.”
Players not interacting with the game as intended? Who woulda thunk? This is why we can’t have nice things. While Embark didn’t confirm any specific timeline for changes, boss encounters and map events are clearly still under the microscope. Certainly it will be interesting to see how the developer uses all the data from our play time so far to create new encounters.
And hey, at some point those enormous Arcs currently looming ominously on the horizon are going to arrive, right? Well, we asked Embark about adding an Emperor Arc itself as an actual map, to which Watkins responded: “I mean, the execution, it’s a lot of fun, [and] I think it’s a natural want to be like, ‘you see those giant ones on the horizon, what does the inside of that look like I wonder?’.” Yeah, I wonder too, Embark—sounds like a hint if you ask me.
Read our full interview with Embark’s Virgil Watkins tomorrow.