I have a lot of fond memories about Arc Raiders' release. The world was beautiful, terrifying, and expansive. It provided some of the best community interactions I've had in a game to date, and it was just a refreshingly good time to share with friends. But that didn't last as long as I and many others would have hoped, with executive producer Aleksander Grøndal admitting that Embark overestimated its capacity for work.
"Transitioning to live service is going to be fucking hard. Everyone said that to me. I've even said that to other people. I was mentally prepared for it to be hard—but I wasn't completely prepared for how hard it was," Grøndal says in an interview with Game Developer. "When you build a game up until launch, you build and you test and you build and you test and you fix things and measure results. So the way that we've been building video games was based on that idea—but now the demands of the players are really high, we feel like we really can't go much faster."
Arc Raiders is sadly a very good example of suffering from success. Sure, the devs had an inkling of how big this game could get, but I don't think anyone could've predicted the heights Arc Raiders would reach. Embark also made no secret of the fact that it simply wasn't as big or well-equipped as other live-service competitors like Activision Blizzard or Riot, but the team still tried to keep up the pace that was expected of them.
This is a recipe for disaster, with Grøndal explaining how "the team [was] super tired" but that they still tried to put "out content as fast as we can but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well." Trying to keep pace with players that were completing events, sussing out arcs, and exploring maps faster than Embark could add them led to a very long and very stale period, which then saw a huge drop-off in players.
"I'm proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year," Grøndal adds. "But at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that. We didn't have the time. You also have a lot of the cost of just maintaining the game—implementing bug fixes, exploits, and other constraints. We were constantly overshooting our capacity and so it was hard to plan when there's so much to do. There's a lot of maintenance and cleanup [that takes up so much of your time]."
It didn't just have a negative impact on the game, as the devs also began to feel the pains of overextending. "The team were super unhappy. To be fair, they were running really hard milestones and that wasn't fun and challenging, so we had to do something. The players were also complaining and I don't think the consistency was high enough."
Being burned out feels super shitty to be honest. It's terrible. I don't recommend it to anyone.
Aleksander Grøndal, executive producer
The cycle only stopped when the team asked themselves "why are we doing this?" and re-evaluated their long-term plan for Arc Raiders. "Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths [...] and what we produce will be better, more interesting, and higher-quality across the board. It also gives us time to work things out instead of just shipping, shipping, shipping. We can actually iterate."
Grøndal also stresses that they needed to put an end to the ongoing burnout. "It's super important [to protect people]," he says. "I can tell you a personal story. I was burned out. We'd just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken. We talk about burnout and it's obviously bad, but being burned out feels super shitty to be honest. It's terrible. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also, it means we lose good people who might be out [of work] for a very long time."
There's always going to be more to do in a live service game like Arc Raiders. And while there are some very serious reworks needed and problems to address—like its anticheat—I'd never want anyone to prioritise content over their health. It's just a game, after all, and more often than not well-rested and happy people create better things. It may take longer to get new content, but a more relaxed and committed approach to Arc Raiders will make for a better game in the longrun—we're already seeing the fruits of that tack with Frozen Trail.
"It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance," Grøndal adds. "If we think long-term about this product—not just in small increments but big-picture stuff—we need all of these great people. Those are the people who built Arc Raiders in the first place." I couldn't agree more.
