$40 extraction shooter Arc Raiders was a very different game when it was first revealed at The Game Awards in December 2021 as the debut title from former Battlefield devs' Embark Studios. The studio's, ultimately, second game was a free-to-play co-op shooter. According to creative director Stefan Strandberg, the game was "some sort of Venn diagram between Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead, and PUBG."
Strandberg explains further in a new video series from Embark exploring how Arc Raiders transformed during its years in development. The studio co-founder remembers when it was made up of only six people, all confident about using Unreal Engine, and not much else.
"Technology-wise, I mean, we quickly settled on Unreal, and then, in conjunction with that, we also had proprietary tech that we were developing," says Strandberg, resolute. But Embark's pitches for its game's actual content were more misty.
Embark knew it had to incorporate "the prospect of space travel," an idea that still fits Arc Raiders' doomed prophecy for Earth. But the studio also liked the idea of including "the impending sort of ecological collapse, the rise of AI, and the man versus machine angle."
"When we were the first initial group sort of vetting different concepts, I think those were the things that were sticky in there," says Strandberg.
"On paper, that was a super compelling concept," he continues, "especially the 'making you a small human in a vast world with huge machines'" like Shadow of the Colossus. "That's what we started to explore. Not knowing at all what kind of game loop we were supposed to have, but just looking at the prospects of different mechanics in that context."
