Arc Raiders Is Actually Getting Better After Launch Because Embark Studios Is Fixing Everything
Writer based in London, UK. Several years writing guide coverage for some of the largest video game launches, with a focus on MMOs.
Embark Studios is riding the high of its life right now. Arc Raiders is an undeniable success, soaring past 700,000 concurrent players and selling millions of copies. It has brought the extraction shooter into the mainstream and dominated Twitch and YouTube since release.
And now, just a couple of weeks after launch, the game is already planning its next massive content drop – the Stella Montis map, new Arc enemies, and even a new legendary weapon – leaving me and many fans a little overwhelmed. Even though I’ve had a great time with the game so far, I did have some pretty big problems with it. But in the handful of days since launch, almost all of them have already been fixed.
Arc Raiders is one of the best multiplayer experiences in a long time, but does it deserve GOTY?
I’d literally just finished writing an article about the dodgy desync problems in Arc Raiders when Embark announced its latest update that makes improvements to player latency in servers, which should reduce the desyncing problems many are currently experiencing. We’ll wait and see if this has made any big difference, but it’s already a step in the right direction.
It comes just a day after Embark announced it had been secretly testing duo queues (now active in the game), and had plans to slash the prices of cosmetics and refund the difference to players. The studio is on an unbelievable run, listening to community feedback and making changes quickly and efficiently. A big budget multiplayer video game making rapid changes that are based on addressing community issues? Shocked Pikachu, amirite? Wait, I’m actually hearing I’m now ‘unc’ and no one uses that meme anymore. You know, multiplayer gamers can be mean.
Before Arc Raiders came Battlefield 6. I still love that game and play it a lot, but it has already seen so many negative changes since launch. A cosmetic store crammed in, plus a Call Of Duty-esque Battle Royale and some wacky skins to boot, has tainted some of the goodwill I felt towards DICE and EA since Battlefield’s big revival. Now it just feels like any other multiplayer shooter helmed by an evil corporate overlord who wants to extract as much cash as possible from you.
The Arc Raiders Dilemma
Arc Raiders, on the other hand… well, things feel a bit different. Three big community issues have arisen since launch (duo queues, overpriced cosmetics, and desync) and all three have been resolved within days. The Harvester event has also been disabled because players found an exploit that allowed you to kill the Queen using a single Blaze Trap, and it took less than 24 hours of this to becoming public knowledge before the event was delisted entirely. That’s a fantastic turnaround.
Compare that to Battlefield 6 again, and you can see why these rapid changes to Arc Raiders are making such an impression on the community. The Battlefield 6 drone exploit – a glitch that allowed you to use the drone and a sledgehammer to catapult yourself into the sky, allowing you to access unreachable rooftops – made the Breakthrough game mode (one of the most popular) basically unplayable for weeks.
In the most recent change to Battlefield 6, the player numbers for the Breakthrough mode have been reduced from 64 players to 48 in some cases. While this is probably an okay thing for the health of the game (some of those maps are too small for 64 players), the fact DICE thought it okay not to inform the community makes the whole thing feel a bit nefarious. You don’t really feel like a member of the community in Battlefield, you are just a cog in a bigger machine.
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Embark Studios is setting the example of the new norm for multiplayer games: receptive changes and clear communication. It heard about the community’s issues with cosmetic pricing, and reduced the cost by £1 or £2 across the board. It heard about people wanting a duo queue, tested it, and then released it.
Desync was one of the biggest problems with the game according to its more competitive community, and, well, you guessed it, Embark has addressed that as well. Goodwill goes a long way with game loyalty, and I think Embark is building an impressive foundation here for a title that might hang around in the zeitgeist for much longer than anyone originally anticipated. After all, it’s not just about making a good game, it’s about making people want to play it.
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