Sci-fi extraction shooter Arc Raiders is doing one last public playtest this weekend before its launch at the end of October, but quite a few players felt it was already good to go after its successful April playtest—or just wanted it to release ASAP so they could keep playing, perhaps more accurately.
That Arc playtest compared favorably to a parallel Marathon playtest, as Morgan pointed out at the time, and was praised for its technical soundness. But the plan then was to release Arc in October (although the date hadn't yet been announced) and it stayed that way, because despite the fans angling for a surprise drop, it was "absolutely not ready," design director Virgil Watkins told PC Gamer in an interview this week.
"It was interesting to see how many people wanted us to drop it, or even shortly after [the playtest], expected us to drop the game," said Watkins. "But on our end, the game was absolutely not ready. I'm happy that a lot of people thought the game ran well, but we had a lot of optimization to still do. We had a bunch of features we still needed to finish. There were bugs, and thankfully they didn't show up too much in a lot of people's footage, but there were some bad bugs. We had to fix a lot of things."
There've been feature additions since then, too, in particular to late-game progression. Trials add challenges to the progression system with a leaderboard, and the Expedition Project, which Watkins explained in a recent blog post, is Arc's answer to server resets.
Rather than resetting everyone, Expeditions allow the most dedicated players to forfeit their progress in exchange for the Zen feeling that comes with rejecting attachment to gun attachments, special account unlocks, and other not-yet-finalized rewards. It sounds a bit like Call of Duty's Prestige system, which has many variations but in its most basic form let you give up all your unlocks and start over at level 1 for the sake of bragging rights.
Balance was a concern, as well: "People thankfully thought it was in a pretty good state [in the April playtest], but we have the telemetry," Watkins said, laughing. "We know certain things were not exactly doing what they should have."
And in the world of live service games, you're not really ready to launch until you've at least got some nearly-ready new stuff to roll out in the weeks after the release date.
"We obviously added a new map since Tech Test 2 that you're aware of, and we've teased the fifth, which players will get to start engaging with, kind of, very, very shortly after launch, in a roundabout way," Watkins said. "And then just bolstering our item sets, our enemy sets, new map conditions, so they saw the night raids and a few other things in Tech Test 2, and we just extended those to offer new types of play and ways of playing."
Arc Raiders is set to launch on October 30, and this weekend's server slam has already put up impressive numbers: over 185,000 Steam concurrents at last check.
Note, though, that the full game won't be free like the playtests. Perhaps inspired by the success of Helldivers 2, developer Embark switched from free-to-play to a $40 price tag last year. Watkins said that the switch was a relief from his perspective, as it allowed the team to focus on designing fun crafting and progression systems rather than having to "dangle that cosmetic carrot" in front of players all the time.
