ARC Raiders Confirms It's Experimenting With Team Sizes

EXCLUSIVE: ARC Raiders only lets you assemble teams of up to three players, but that could change, potentially fulfilling the game's original vision.

ARC Raiders developer Embark Studios hasn't completely discounted the idea of increasing team sizes in the extraction shooter. The maximum number of players that can currently fill a squad is three, though queueing alone or with just a single partner will most often place you in raids with other solo or duo players. ARC Raiders is always evolving, however, and special circumstances could conceivably see larger fireteams being formed.

ScreenRant's Rob Keyes spoke with developers at Embark Studios, and we asked if increasing ARC Raiders' team size was a possibility, whether it be for limited-time events or special maps, and for both PvP and PvE. "Yes, that is certainly something we're playing around with," answered Executive Producer Aleksander Grøndal. "Though no commitments just yet."

Embark is understandably cagey about its plans, though elsewhere Grøndal said, "We're continuously discussing [...] how to create interesting challenges that invite the players to think and strategize a bit differently than they are used to."

Changing team sizes would certainly be a way to force new strategies, and it's likely something that has been on Embark's radar not only during ARC Raiders' post-launch support, but throughout development. ARC Raiders was first conceived to be exclusively PvE, and was even revealed back in 2021 as a co-op shooter. Early trailers and gameplay footage show large numbers of Raiders teaming up to take down towering ARC machines – something that's not uncommon in friendly lobbies, but is more a result of how players have chosen to engage with the game, rather than an explicit design choice.

"Before we shipped this game we didn't really know what the players wanted or how our playerbase would look after release," admits Grøndal. He goes on to note that most players participate in a mix of PvP and PvE, and that "Right now, one of the big things that players are saying is that they are running out of things to do, so a key focus for us is to give players just that." Creating limited-time events designed specifically around larger teams might be difficult to square with Embark's larger design ethos for ARC Raiders, however.

"Most of our content is sandbox in nature and that supports various different play styles," Grøndal told Screen Rant, "and we prefer to keep it that way rather than building specific content for a specific player type at the moment." A bespoke PvE mode that increases the number of player per team could be a huge event, but it definitely falls under the category of "content for a specific player type." The alternative would simply be allowing teams of four or five to be formed with no special parameters, which would also have major gameplay implications.

Creating new content for a game that thrives on being a sandbox is thus paradoxically difficult and straightforward. Giving players more things to do means just that – more items to loot, more enemies to fight, more maps to explore (while also refining existing systems like blueprints). Embark is already developing multiple new ARC Raiders maps, and there is, of course, a need to fill them with novel items and ARC machines. But stagnation can harm a live-service game; players grow bored, and they'll just move on to the next big thing.

Ongoing development is a constant battle to deliver fresh ideas that aren't simultaneously alienating. "We want to create engaging new content that feels fresh, unique and distinctly ARC Raiders," says Grøndal. ARC Raiders as we know it caps a team at three members, and upsetting that balance could be unsatisfactory, despite how enticing the idea is. ARC Raiders is experimenting with larger team sizes, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'll see them introduced any time soon.