I also asked how Embark Studios plans to make a notoriously difficult genre appeal to more people
Arc Raiders, the upcoming PvPvE extraction shooter from developer Embark Studios (The Finals) is out tomorrow. I recently had a chance to sit down with the game’s design director, Virgil Watkins, to chat about the brutal nature of extraction shooters, how Arc Raiders seeks to appeal to folks skeptical of the genre’s hardcore nature, and, of course, whether my playstyle is toxic.
Below is the transcript of our discussion about Arc Raiders’ approach to making the extraction shooter more friendly without compromising its intensity.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
© Screenshot: Embark Studios / Kotaku
Kotaku: So in Arc Raiders I can sprint, I can walk, I can dodge out of the way of incoming fire, I can swap the camera on my shoulder. But why can’t I lay down?
Virgil Watkins, Design Director on Arc Raiders: Well, I mean, one, it is a massive animation hurdle to get that to behave correctly in all the states, and then two, just kind of the way the game is balanced and the pacing of it. Having people default to proning and hiding kind of disrupts that.
Read More: Arc Raiders’ Dev Addresses Graphics Downgrade, Enemy Difficulty, And More Ahead Of Release
And honestly, given the way our drones are, once you’re found in that state, it’d probably wouldn’t be fun because our movement tends to be quite weighty and so I can imagine trying to get up while a Rocketeer is about to explode you is maybe not fun. But overall, it just didn’t feel like it fit with the game loop we’ve got.
Kotaku: Gotcha. Okay. So extraction shooters tend to appeal to a very specific crowd. Are you guys content with a game that mostly appeals to a hardcore niche?
Read More: Arc Raiders Is So Good I’m Worried It Will Completely Take Over My Life
Watkins: Once we pivoted to an extraction game, approachability became a key design tenet. Everything we have done up to this point tries to keep that in mind wherever possible, as long as it does not undermine that core extraction experience. We’ve put in a lot of systems that can act as a safety net or can soften the blow of failure. We have things like our quests, which many of them do not require you to extract.
We have the safe pocket, which lets you put quest items that you might need in there and make incremental progress toward that goal. We have things in the meta game like our feats or trials which will come out with the launch of the game that, again, by progressing on some of these things, you can do it without extracting from the round, which is really nice to, even in that moment of failure, still understand that you’ve made some progress and earned something as a result.
And then on the other side of it, we have what we kind of call “economic safety nets.” So we have the free loadout, which has no strings attached, you can just always choose it and have kind of a minimum quality of play while you’re using those kits. And then we have Scrappy the rooster, and he’ll give you a drip feed of materials so that you’re able to craft a few things as you go. And we’ve actually tuned him so that if you’re having a bad run of luck, he provides you with a touch more crafting materials compared to someone who’s being highly successful.
We really like when our fights are a lot of back and forth rather than just instantaneous.
What we found in earlier tests is that highly successful players didn’t need [Scrappy as much]. But then the people who actually needed [the extra resources] were the ones who were getting left behind. So with all of that in mind, we wanted to shave off the those pointy edges [of the genre] so players who are maybe more nervous around this type of game or are apprehensive about how punishing it can be can fall back on these things and still feel like they’re capable of having fun and playing the game in the intended fashion as opposed to being down to just your knife and running it and going “I hope this works, I guess.”
Kotaku: Cool. Am I a bad person for camping the elevator to kill players as they try to extract?
Watkins: [laughs] I mean. No. It is a tactic. It’s been an interesting topic around that because we try to provide enough alternate ways out, and of course, the amount of extraction points reduces as the round goes on. You have the hatch keys that you can use to go out the quieter way. Of course, extraction camping is a concern in any of these games, but when we go and look at our telemetry for how players actually behave around extractions, the incidence rate, as far as we can tell, of extraction camping is incredibly low.
© Screenshot: Embark Studios / Kotaku
What you’ll tend to see is people making a decision, “oh, I hear [the elevator coming up]. Maybe I’ll go for it.” But in terms of like, literally just waiting there, it is a way to play and if you’re successful at it, I imagine you can get a decent bump in [loot] if you’re a good enough player to hold out there, but it tends to be that you’ll draw more attention [by camping]. Flares go off from people you’re fighting, drones get curious and they come investigating. So, hopefully things are tuned and positioned around those extractions enough where it’s not like, say, a perfect strategy, but it’s certainly an opportunistic one.
Kotaku: Where do you think the line is between aggressive playstyles and toxicity?
Watkins: Yeah, that’s a tough one, right? I think, because we have some social systems, we have emotes, we’ve got proximity voice, I certainly think players could, if they so chose, turn those into a toxic element. We’ve seen a couple of instances where people bring like 10 defibs [items used to revive another player quickly] and then revive people and then kill them again, so we put in a few things like being able to accept revives rather than being at the whim of someone else. You should always have some agency over yourself where you can choose to surrender instead of being subjected [to abuse].
But yeah, of course it’s a risk once you give players this level of autonomy. There’s gonna be people who take advantage of it.
Kotaku: What’s your ideal run in a round of Arc Raiders?
Watkins: I tend to play in a non-hostile manner such that I won’t necessarily seek out fights, but I will take them if they start it with me. So I like trying to take a more contemplative approach. I’ll try to use where the drones are or aren’t, what the drones are doing and noticing, and I’ll use that information.
I tend to be a very evasive player. Even if someone starts a fight with me, if I’m not very, very confident that I can win that fight in that moment, I will do enough to make them panic, and I will disengage and move somewhere else entirely, and maybe take the fight again from a different angle, or just disappear and let them run around and try to find me.
© Screenshot: Embark Studios / Kotaku
It’s kind of like Batman or something. I just disappear and then I’m doing something else, which I find really fun, trying to work around groups of players to still get what I need while taking fights when possible.
Kotaku: There are a lot of bushes and hiding spots in the game. At what point is a hiding spot unfair?
Watkins: What we’ve tried to do with our combat balance is that we have a longer TTK (time-to-kill) and alongside approachability, one of the primary tenets of designing this game is that you should always have time to understand and react to what is happening to you.
And that does not guarantee that you will succeed in your reaction, but you should at least be capable of ascertaining what led to [a bad] situation and what could have changed the outcome next time you go into that situation.
So on even footing, the way the TTK is balanced, if you’re full health and full shields, and so am I, if you attack me first, there’s a solid chance that I will probably be able to back away, disengage, do something to kind of mitigate that situation, because we really like when our fights are a lot of back and forth rather than just instantaneous.
And of course, if you’re on super low health, then sure, you might get into a bad situation, but I think that comes along with trying to soften the blow of defeat. You should be capable of running again and learning in a more rapid manner.
But I guarantee there’s gonna be places people find where they’re like, yeah, this is actually a really prime hiding spot, and I can do a lot from here and I can’t be touched. But that is where, again, things like noise traps, how much attention drones pay to noise and your movements and things, so wherever possible, we give a lot of clues to people moving into spaces or through spaces. If they’re paying attention, they can probably pick up on the fact that someone’s nearby, and even your characters once in close proximity to them, you’re hearing the foley of their outfit and their footsteps.
So unless someone’s literally holding exactly still, we try to give as many opportunities as possible for you to be aware of others around you.
Kotaku: How much time do you anticipate a player spending on Arc Raiders in a week?
Watkins: I would guess, just for the type of game this is and the type of player I expect to go on, it’s probably something on the order of like four to 10 hours would be my personal guess. There’s enough different things to do that you, you’re not literally just doing like one run over and over. You’re progressing a quest or crafting that new thing or going after this challenge.
Kotaku: Has anything surprised you during the technical tests?
Watkins: Certainly the clips coming of the Leaper going after people have been very, very entertaining.
Like, of course, we already kind of knew what it could do, but I think so many of us [at Embark] are already familiar with how it maneuvers and the way it tries to engage that I think we almost inherently play around that just from the outset. Whereas players now are coming into contact with it for the first time and it’s causing them to lead it into and engage it in very bizarre locations that still work out to be very compelling.
And that was just kind of a happy coincidence. Like we did some changes to it so that it was more capable of navigating places like that and it just worked out now, and I’m pretty excited to see once players get it in the other maps with some other very unique geometry and setups, how it’s gonna surprise them.
Arc Raiders launches on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on October 30, 2025.
