Embark 为何要在《Arc Raiders》上“拉手刹” | 完整采访

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In This Edition,
Embark’s Patrick Söderlund and Aleksander Grøndal on

• The problem with success

• Turning Arc Raiders around

• Making games faster

• The great PvE debate

We spoke with Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund last year on the eve of the launch of Arc Raiders.

The extraction shooter wasn’t out yet, but every single metric suggested it was about to do something unthinkable. A new IP was about to go head-to-head with Battlefield and Call of Duty and come out smiling.

And Arc Raiders was a phenomenal success. It sold 16 million copies in a little over six months. Publisher Nexon had never had seen a launch like it, and movie studios were queuing up to sign it.

“As the pre-order numbers started to come in - and we obviously could monitor that in the studio - we just saw them go up in ways where we had to double-check whether the numbers were accurate or not,” Söderlund recalls.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal adds: “I don’t think we understood what kind of a monster we unleashed. The game exploded in ways that I didn’t see happening at all. When I look back at it, I was just walking on air.”

Grøndal and Söderlund played Arc Raiders obsessively every night. Söderlund estimates that the two spent upwards of 300 hours playing the game during those early months. “That’s what I will remember,” he says. “Just that joy of longing to come home and play something every single evening.”

However, this success soon became a problem.

“The game took off in a way that we didn’t anticipate,” Söderlund continues. “And we became a victim of our own success to some extent. We had like 80% day-one retention, which meant everyone that played the game decided to continue playing, which is what you want as a game maker. But it meant we got an incredible demand for more. People just wanted more Arc Raiders. And at about 100 hours, they were kind of done with what we had given them.

“I said, ‘Listen, if you pay $40 and you get 100 hours’ worth of playtime, I think it’s a reasonable return.’ But at the same time, we built something that became more than we anticipated. We were reasonably prepared, but obviously not prepared for what happened.”

Embark had plenty of big updates for the first few months, but things slowed down when they got to 2026.

“We had a Christmas break,” Grøndal says. “I remember I was in Spain, just looking at it from the outside, looking at the numbers and at livestreams, and it dawned on me that at some point we’re going to run into some challenges. Since we front-loaded so much of our systems and content into the launch season, we didn’t really have that much lined up for January and February.

“When we came back, we had to look at the data, look at the feedback, and try to figure out where to go from here. We created another roadmap, and we tried to make sure that we executed on the monthly updates. But [after a while] a game of this size has problems that start becoming apparent. We had to split our focus between the things we wanted to add and the things that required maintenance.”

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The popularity of Arc Raiders meant it had become a target for cheaters.

“We’ve continuously been improving our methods to detect it using machine learning and third-party tools,” Grøndal says. “We’ve been seeing good results from our efforts over time. Is it ever going to be fully solvable? Probably not. But I feel like we’re on a good path right now.

“I wish that there were better ways to deal with that problem as an industry, because it’s costing us a lot of money.”

The result of all this is that Arc Raiders’ player numbers began to tumble.

“All you want is to make sure that whatever negative sentiment sits around your product, you cure that,” Söderlund says. “That is human nature, especially when you have had something that was met with such love and critical acclaim. As people stopped playing it, they were saying, ‘Why isn’t there more Arc Raiders? What is the studio doing? They’re not listening to us.’ It’s not like the studio took a break, went to a beach, celebrated, never came back, and didn’t care about the game. That’s not what happened.

“There were absolutely moments of a little bit of panic. I don’t mind it. It’s good to be relatively paranoid if you make video games.”

The instinct at this point was to just make more stuff. But Embark took the counter-intuitive decision to do the opposite.

“There were absolutely moments of a little bit of panic”

“Trust us, we listen to the players, we read everything, all we want to do is please them and give them what they’re longing for,” Söderlund says. “But we actually have to live with the reality of… how do we do this? What does it mean for us? People need to build everything. What can we build? It’s not like we’re sitting here ignoring what’s being said.

“The decision that was made was to slow down, to go back to the drawing board, and to stop monthly drops. We realized that would have an impact on our sales numbers and on engagement. But we had to live with the fact that the team and the product, and the integrity of the game, needed that breathing space, to be able to make a comeback.

“That’s a difficult decision to make when you’re sitting on top, to say, ‘slow down. Pull the handbrake. Let’s not do this right now’, when your instinct may be, ‘no, you have to do more, push harder, and get more stuff out. We should go to bi-weekly drops instead of monthly cadences.’ That’s just human reaction.”

Söderlund admits he had to “digest” the team’s suggestion to do this, but is now confident in the decision, especially following the success of its major update last month called Frozen Trail.

“We managed to get a lot of players back,” Grøndal says. “We were able to address a lot of the concerns that they were having about the game.”

Check out the full interview with Söderlund and Grøndal above. Or read-on for more stories, including the great PvE debate.

Inside the Arc Raiders PvE debate

Arc Raiders is a player vs player vs environment (PvPvE) game. This means players must simultaneously compete against human players and computer-controlled enemies and hazards. But that wasn’t always the case. During the development, the game was initially a PvE game, where players weren’t fighting each other.

Ultimately, Embark decided against this direction. Today, however, it’s reconsidering that position. There are three general player groups in Arc Raiders. Those that are friendly and don’t want to fight, those that want that mix, and those that just want to battle. And so last month, Embark ran a test where players could toggle on an option that prevented them from hurting each other.

“We could just frankly add PvE,” Söderlund says. “It’s not a difficult thing to do. But we didn’t want to obstruct or fiddle too much with the core loop of the game where the PvP aspect of a PvPvE game does add, we believe, adequate tension.

“When you’re building a game, what you’re trying to do is to evoke emotion in players. If you can evoke emotions in people, you’re probably doing something right. It could be joy, it could be fear, whatever your aspirations are. A game that does all of those things will probably do relatively well. Arc Raiders does touch a lot of those different types of emotions, and by removing one substantial component, you’re fiddling with the core emotional loop, which we believed was not the right thing to do.

“We’ve now since tried it and realized that it’s fine. Maybe people can choose what they like. But that was our fear all along. People may have been wondering, ‘why the hell aren’t they just doing what some players were looking for?’ We were looking at the holistic picture, which we have to do. And to protect the creative integrity of what we have created.”

“We could just frankly add PvE. It’s not a difficult thing to do”

Grøndal adds: “We’re going through that data right now. What we did see, which was really interesting, is that there was a huge amount of interest in it, and there were a lot of players who tried it out, and almost 50% of the rounds that were played during the test were on the PvE server. It created a moment.

“Some of the interesting takeaways are that some people who said, ‘Hey, I want PvE,’ changed their mind. They didn’t want it because it was lacking some of the values that the product had. And then you had players who absolutely loved it.

“Now it’s for us to figure out how we can cater to the specific needs of the players. But of course, not at the expense of the integrity of the experience itself, where you water it down and become a game of nothing.”

“I’ve never seen a design document at Embark”

Last year’s interview with Embark focused on how a comparatively small team was able to make a game of this scale. At the time, Söderlund told us how he challenged the team to rethink how games are made so they can build ‘100 times faster’ than they have in the past.

Part of that has been utilising machine learning and AI, although Söderlund stresses they absolutely do not “use artificial intelligence to auto-generate games for us.”

Considering its success, I asked him if he’s been inundated by other studios seeking advice

“Absolutely, but it’s not always the answer they hope to hear, because what we’re doing is foundational in many aspects,” he explains. “We started by redefining what it takes to build a video game, and that means throwing out a lot of old practices and ideas.

“I’ve never seen a design document at Embark. They don’t exist. Why would a design on paper for something that is inherently interactive be the right way of doing it? I can’t read a game. I’ve got to play it. We’re all about building systems that facilitate us playing what we’re talking about, rather than putting it on paper and trying to imagine how this is going to feel. There are no such things [as a design document] at Embark. There never has been and never will be. If you are an old-school developer and you’re used to designing things on paper, I’m not saying that’s wrong, but for us it wasn’t the right thing.

“Sometimes, when we talk to people and tell them what we do, that may not be what they’re looking for. The Embark way works for Embark because we built it that way. It may not mean that it works for someone else.”

Ultimately, it’s about daring to challenge conventions, Söderlund says. But “you’ve got to find your own version of that.”

“We don’t want to just be a live-service studio”

Embark now operates two live service games. Its other game, the free-to-play shooter The Finals, is now on Season 12 and performing well.

Last year, Söderlund told us that Embark is working on new titles, too. However, with two complicated, challenging and successful live service games in the market, are they still devoting resources to future projects?

“We are and we have to,” he says. “We talk consciously all the time about how we don’t want to just be a live-service studio, even though there’s nothing wrong with that. It allows the electricity bill to be paid and the people to be paid. It’s important for us, and we also believe that the player base out there deserve it. But at the same time, we need to be forward-looking. We need to lean in and challenge ourselves to build new things at all times. That is the ethos of Embark, and that’s never going to stop.”

Check the full interview above, where we also discuss the firm’s approach to AI, Hollywood’s interest in Arc Raiders, Söderlund’s Nexon role, what’s new with The Finals, and the challenge of not growing too big.