Arc Raiders Nearly Scrapped PvP After Negative Playtests

Arc Raiders PvE vs PvP debate has been swirling since the game's release, though PvE seems to have taken the upperhand recently. During a panel at GDC, Embark Studios’s production director, Caio Braga, revealed that the game nearly dropped all the PvP aspects after early play tests of the feature.

For those unaware, Arc Raiders was originally designed as a purely PvE-focused game, that would have seen players team up with other players to take down bosses and ARC enemies. During development, the game pivoted to a PvPvE model, but early playtests nearly had the team scrap the PvP idea all together.

According to Braga, early playtests involving the player-vs-player combat revealed a ‘substantial negative PvP sentiment.’

They didn’t like the PvP.

A lot of our initial conversation was about whether we should have even done this reset. Should we add PvP to this?

(Shoutout to PC Gamer for the quote)

However, Embark stuck with it, and after some balancing of weapons and offensive tools, and limiting how often solo players clashed with squads, the studio was able to address the concerns of ‘fairness’ players had for the combat system in play tests.

For now, PvP has been a core part of the Arc Raiders model, which, of course, has spawned countless debates on the necessity of the feature in the game.

Do you think Arc Raiders should have PvP or should it go back to being solely a PvE focused game? Let us know in the comments and come hang out in our GamerzTheory Discord.