Co-op Shadow of the Colossus and hero looter shooter: the genres Arc Raiders devs' thought it was during development

"Everyone in the team could do what they believed the game was"

I think that genres, particularly in the realm of games, are often more used as marketing tools than signifiers of the contents therewithin. Still! Genre labels are a useful thing to quickly ascertain the thing you're doing in a game. Take, for example, Arc Raiders and its specific genre of extraction shooter. You know you'll be shooting, and extracting something, even if it technically isn't that simple in practice, but you get the gist. However, at one point in time, the genre of the game completely depended on who you asked.

Production director Caio Braga recently gave a talk at GDC (as attended by PC Gamer) discussing his experience coming into Embark to work on Arc Raiders. According to Braga, when he started in 2020, there wasn't anyone who could tell him the single genre the game was supposed to be. "You'd ask someone who would say it was a battle royale versus Arc, or it's a co-op Shadow of the Colossus game, or it's a hero looter shooter… our Arc developers thought the game was a co-op Souls game," Braga explained, apparently offering up his own idea of what the game was: a boss fight race with obstacles.

This range of ideas over what the game was meant that each team did have some freedom to do what they wanted, with Braga explaining that "Everyone in the team could do what they believed the game was." The flipside to this is that there was no balance. A person designing weapons might make one that was way too powerful, and an Arc designer would then make them too hard in return. In another case, some devs felt that minimalistic UI would be more immersive, but those working on UX felt there wasn't enough detail so added too much in the form of XP, enemy names, and damage numbers.

Braga explained that this was essentially happening on a daily basis. "Every play test would be playing one of those five or six different games." And so what they found is that no one in external playtests was having fun consistently, leading to a big reset, even if, as Braga said, "a lot of games would have been cancelled at this point," considering the time and cost spent on it. So, Embark "stopped forcing the game [or games] we wanted, and we looked at the game we had," arriving at the genre it now is, an extraction shooter.

With such a range of perspectives I'm honestly a tad unsure how Arc Raiders came out as well as it has, but hey ho, sometimes if the sauce is there, it's there.