Arc Raiders design director says players 'never worked together' in testing, but the emergence of care bear lobbies 'encourages us to lean toward giving opportunities to have friendly interactions'

Arc Raiders Trophy Display: Key art showing three characters. The one on the left is wearing a blue pincho and holding a pistol ready at their hip. The middle figure is wearing a brown poncho and cowboy hat, facing the camera with a pistol across their chest. On the right is another character in a brown poncho and hat but facing away. — (Image credit: Embark)

Arc Raiders is a fascinating social experiment, and also occasionally a videogame. Even as someone on the outskirts, I've sunk hours into watching social interactions play out between rats and good guys, chucked into a pressure cooker where you can kill each other, but are never forced to.

Speaking to PC Gamer's own Tim Clark, design director Virgil Watkins says that the presence of these peace-loving raiders was a surprise even to the development team: "It is not at all how it was working in our tests, either for ourselves or the previous tests. It was hyper, hyper aggressive in those tests, people never worked together."

Though Watkins also acknowledges that the PvP players they were expecting aren't left in the dust, either: "We just have to primarily make sure that the PvP side of the game is as fair as we can make it, and there's still things we need to work out … We still have the mantra (and this is even regardless of the formation of this PvE heavy audience) the mantra is that the game never asks you to fight other players. That's entirely your own decision."

All this plate spinning's in the service of player agency, rather than playing favourites with slices of the playerbase: "That's actually kind of the hope with all of it: Letting players lead with their own motivations and create all those stories for each other. And that's not something we can ever author or force to happen. And I'm glad that we don't try. I far prefer that we give players the means and the context and the opportunity to do these things, and then they do what they want to do."

Turns out, the prisoner's dilemma does not account for silly little guys doing Looney Toons trickery. Our own Elie Gould, for example, has a homebrew strategy of—and I just want to quote them, here: "trauma dumping about how long a year it's been, and how few things bring me joy anymore—people usually leave me to crawl away or even give me a defib." Remember, if it works, it's not psychological manipulation (for legal purposes this is a joke).

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

With contributions from

Tim Clark

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