Arc Raiders design director says players 'never worked together' in testing, but the emergence of care bear lobbies 'encourages us to lean toward giving opportunities to have friendly interactions'

Arc Raiders is a fascinating social experiment, and also occasionally a videogame. Even as someone on the outskirts, I've sunk hours into watching social interactions play out between rats and good guys, chucked into a pressure cooker where you can kill each other, but are never forced to.

Speaking to PC Gamer's own Tim Clark, design director Virgil Watkins says that the presence of these peace-loving raiders was a surprise even to the development team: "It is not at all how it was working in our tests, either for ourselves or the previous tests. It was hyper, hyper aggressive in those tests, people never worked together."

Watkins joined Embark Studios as a senior technical designer in October 2021, going on to serve as Arc Raiders' design director since February 2022.

The fact that anyone joined hands with strangers to get some good loot left the team a little flat-footed: "This kind of surprised us, in exactly how many people latch onto, and are having fun with, these [PvE] elements of the game. So it certainly encourages us to lean more toward giving opportunities to have friendly and fun interactions."

Though Watkins also acknowledges that the PvP players they were expecting aren't left in the dust, either: "We just have to primarily make sure that the PvP side of the game is as fair as we can make it, and there's still things we need to work out … We still have the mantra (and this is even regardless of the formation of this PvE heavy audience) the mantra is that the game never asks you to fight other players. That's entirely your own decision."

It's a balancing act. Watkins tells us that, on the one hand: "You're always going to have people who have the motivation to fight, because there are people who just like PvP," but on the other, "We have this cohort of players who want to play more peacefully, or roleplay, ensuring that we don't harm their experience either. So it is a precarious position."

All this plate spinning's in the service of player agency, rather than playing favourites with slices of the playerbase: "That's actually kind of the hope with all of it: Letting players lead with their own motivations and create all those stories for each other. And that's not something we can ever author or force to happen. And I'm glad that we don't try. I far prefer that we give players the means and the context and the opportunity to do these things, and then they do what they want to do."

For example, Watkins has an appreciation for players who cause "chaos on purpose, like they'll have a silenced weapon and watch two people being friendly, and they'll shoot at just the right moment [to trick them]. The guy turns around like, why'd you do that? And they get in a fight, and then a third guy shows up, and they punish the first guy, and then no one knows what's going on anymore."

Turns out, the prisoner's dilemma does not account for silly little guys doing Looney Toons trickery. Our own Elie Gould, for example, has a homebrew strategy of—and I just want to quote them, here: "trauma dumping about how long a year it's been, and how few things bring me joy anymore—people usually leave me to crawl away or even give me a defib." Remember, if it works, it's not psychological manipulation (for legal purposes this is a joke).

Read our full interview with Embark's Virgil Watkins tomorrow.