ARC Raiders was born as an ambitious cooperative PvE, but its structural problems led Embark Studios to completely rebuild it as an extraction PvPvE shooter. The documentary The Evolution of ARC Raiders reveals that decisive turn and the discarded elements that marked its transformation. A new documentary from Embark Studios reveals that its ARC game […]
By Victor Mendez on 11/22/2025
ARC Raiders was born as an ambitious cooperative PvE, but its structural problems led Embark Studios to completely rebuild it as an extraction PvPvE shooter. The documentary The Evolution of ARC Raiders reveals that decisive turn and the discarded elements that marked its transformation.
A new documentary from Embark Studios reveals that its game ARC Raiders was born as a gigantic cooperative PvE title, closer to Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead and PUBG than to the “competitive escape shooter” that we know today, a series that exposes the structural difficulties of the project, the creative turns and the decision that ended up completely redefining the game.
Title that has been available since October 30 and that has achieved notable figures, with more than 480 thousand concurrent players on Steam and 4 million copies sold globally during its launch, which positioned the proposal among the most followed titles of the month and of 2025.
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The initial dream, a massive PvE that never managed to consolidate
As can be seen in the audiovisual work, the first stage of development gave rise to a completely different game from the one we know today. ARC Raiders was originally announced as a large-scale cooperative title, in which teams of players entered an open world devastated by colossal machines and the premise, the developers describe, sought to place itself “between Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead and PUBG.”
This was to present a mix of battles against titans, dynamic survival and unpredictable confrontations, however, that ambition soon collided with reality. Although the team managed to capture spectacular sequences, the experience was irregular and inconsistent and areas of the map offered long walks without relevant events, and the robotic giants could behave erratically, generating confrontations that were too brief or downright anticlimactic.
After the start of the pandemic and the move to remote development, the project was losing cohesion, where the “feel” of the gameplay, difficult to communicate from a distance, began to be diluted and, faced with this stagnation, Embark Studios began the so-called Pivot, a six-month phase that sought to focus on smaller areas of the world and reinforce a minimally solid experience.
The experiment brought memorable moments, but an underlying problem remained, as the game lacked a compelling metagame to motivate long-term progression. The conclusion became inevitable: ARC Raiders, as conceived, could not sustain itself as a pure PvE.
And after that Pivot phase, the studio faced a critical decision, having the options of releasing the game as is, and accepting a possibly negative reception; cancel it; or rebuild it from scratch taking advantage of what has already been created. It was then that an idea defended from the beginning by Patrick Söderlund, founder of Embark, gained strength: integrating PvP as the backbone of the experience.
The team opted for the riskiest and most promising option, deciding to restart the project and thus begin the Reset phase, a profound rearrangement that was not limited to adding confrontations between players, but redefined the entire genre of the game towards a PvPvE extraction shooter.
The shift involved retaining distinctive elements, but also abandoning entire pillars, which were the big boss battles, the hero mechanics, and the idea of building a free-to-play game supported by repeatable PvE content.
This change not only transformed the gameplay, it also altered the internal narrative of the project and thus, ARC Raiders went from being “a game about climbing and knocking down giant machines” to becoming an experience where those same machines represent a constant threat, an environmental factor that conditions each incursion on the surface and each attempt to return with valuable resources to the underground base of Esperanza.
Unpublished materials and a glimpse of the future
The first episode of the documentary not only details the big creative decisions; It also shows unpublished material that never saw the light of day, such as “jump boots with thrusters” that allowed extreme vertical impulses, presented around minute 15:12, elements discarded during the iterations, which help to dimension the scale of the original project and the magnitude of the redesign it underwent.
Screenshot of the documentary about the development of the game – via YouTubeTo close, it is worth noting that this series, made up of three episodes, will be published weekly and the next installment will address another important twist, presenting why Embark decided to abandon the free-to-play model, a topic that promises new revelations about the studio’s long-term vision.
You can see this first chapter below (in English).
Fuente
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