Arc Raiders’ old machine designs sound so diabolical, it’s no wonder they were reworked or removed after poor playtest feedback: ‘At that time, they didn’t fit with the game very well’

I don’t think anyone had it on their bingo cards that Arc Raiders‘ machine design and AI would be so good that people would fervently demand a PvE mode in an extraction shooter. If you did, then good for you, I guess. But it wasn’t always that way, not least because the team was flip-flopping between genres practically every day: One moment the Arc would be Souls-inspired difficulty, and then the next, the players would be the powerhouse.

After Arc Raiders’ production director, Caio Braga, mentioned in his GDC talk that their in-house data team were behind several key overhauls, like PvP, we asked him for a history lesson on the Arc machines in a post-talk interview.

Braga recalled a moment during testing where the Arc machines overall received negative feedback, and the team’s initial reaction was that it was simply an issue with content, that there wasn’t enough variety and they needed to make more. The data team realised that, no, players loved the Arc as a concept, just not all of the individual types.

Braga explained that this largely came down to players’ understanding of how to fight them, and some admittedly unfair balancing. So, which Arc were the least favourite during development?

Hornet: “The armour was insane and players didn’t understand it very well,” Braga said, which I can only assume they fixed by giving the Hornet unplated areas like its back rotors. If so, wow, Hornets sound like they used to be a fully-armoured pain in the arse.Sentinels: “At the time, we didn’t have the [targeting] cone, so it would just shoot at you,” leaving players confused over how it functioned. In other words, it sounds like it was a 360-degree aimbotter. Not fun.Fireballs: This flaming murder ball didn’t originally have the weak spot that opened up when attacking, making it much harder and less obvious to counter. I can’t imagine how annoying Fireballs were before this change, as it’s integral to beating them now.

“Of course, making new enemies is much more fun than fixing the ones you have that aren’t performing,” Braga said, but it was nonetheless a necessary step, reinforced by more nuanced conclusions from the playtest data. So, fix a handful of the Arc they did, and the player sentiment flipped positive.

Naturally, we asked Braga if feedback on any of the current Arcs indicates that they require similar tweaking, to which he replied, “Not really.” That’s more or less because learning this lesson during development paved the way forward. Of course, minor changes to existing Arcs do happen—it wasn’t long ago that the dreaded Rocketeer was ‘fixed’ to make it more aggressive, if that’s even possible.

“We’re always evolving their technology and behaviour trees. We wanted to go quite deep on the tech, and we’ve had a few breakthroughs there.”

As for Arcs that were cut during production, these are largely the big machines built for the original vision of the game, where you were competing to kill the boss first: “They had bigger puzzles”. There were also “suicidal bots” similar, I assume, to Pops, that were removed because they weren’t fun.

“There’s still interesting gameplay to have with them, but at that time, they didn’t fit with the game very well. Every now and then, when we need to do a new Arc, we look at our catalogue to see if there’s any capabilities or art that could be brought back,” Braga explained, using the example of the Firefly which was reworked from its original, removed version and added in the Shrouded Sky update.

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