More than 30 million PvE rounds later, Embark is still weighing whether ARC Raiders gets a permanent PvE mode, and how to do it without gutting the extraction shooter underneath.
Embark's PvE-only matchmaking test ran from 13 to 20 October, and players logged over 30 million PvE rounds.
Embark admits the test was polarising, and says it hasn't decided whether PvE comes back.
Its own data shows 37% of players are friendly co-op types, 34% pure PvP and 27% mixed.
Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal says the challenge is adding PvE without undermining the game's premise.
Embark expects to share its next steps in November.
Embark ran a week of PvE-only ARC Raiders, players piled in for more than 30 million rounds, and the studio still can’t make up its mind. A week after the test wrapped, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal says Embark is doing a deep dive into what it all means, and the community is about as divided as a Speranza vendor queue.
The core problem hasn’t changed. ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter built on the fear that the next Raider you meet might shoot you in the back. Take that away and you’ve got a gorgeous co-op robot hunt. Whether that’s a better game or a gutted one depends entirely on who you ask.
The PvE toggle ran from 13 to 20 October, straight after the Frozen Trail update brought a flood of players back. You could swap between normal PvPvE matchmaking and PvE whenever you liked. Embark’s rules, from its dev blog:
Embark was upfront that this might not work. Grøndal wrote before it started that the test was not a promise of a future PvE mode, and that it was possible the whole thing would flop.
Because its own numbers told it to. In a 24 September dev blog, Embark split the player base into three camps, and the friendly co-op crowd came out on top.
Grøndal has called these players the “dad gamers”: people with limited time who want to get their objectives done without being third-partied on the way to extract. He’s said Embark could see that group “consistently growing a little bit” over the life of the game, with some lobbies already acting like unofficial PvE servers where nobody fired on anyone.
The toggle came out on 20 October. Embark said the test had been polarizing, that it needed time to understand what the data was telling it, and that any decision would prioritise the game’s overall health and enjoyability. A survey went out to a representative sample of players from 22 October, there’s a PvE feedback channel on Embark’s Discord, and the studio expects to say more in November.
Talking to MP1st after the test, Grøndal admitted the studio had been sceptical about PvE for historical reasons. ARC Raiders started life as a PvE co-op game before Embark pivoted to an extraction shooter, and chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg has said that version simply didn’t work. Now the community has embraced PvE anyway.
The challenge, of course, is how we do that without undermining the premise of the game itself.
Aleksander Grøndal, executive producer, to MP1st
He laid out the options Embark is weighing: PvE as a casual side mode between proper raids, as an AI challenge mode, or as a full PvE-only experience. Each would need very different updates down the track. Before the test he’d already told GamesRadar+ that a split into separate PvE and PvPvE games was “very possible”, because the community is already split along those lines.
Embark, you ran the test, 30 million rounds got played and 37% of your players are already playing friendly. That’s not a niche. That’s your biggest audience telling you what it wants. Dragging your feet on it while the hype from Frozen Trail is still warm is how you lose them to the next shiny co-op game.
But the PvP crowd has a point too. The reason ARC Raiders works is that heart-in-mouth moment when you hear footsteps on the way to the lift. If PvE drains the casual players out of normal lobbies, what’s left is a sweatfest, and the extraction side gets worse for everyone. Down here there’s an extra worry: Oceania lobbies are already a smaller pool than the US or Europe, and splitting the queue in two could mean longer waits and emptier raids for NZ and AU players. That’s our concern, not something Embark has said.
The answer seems obvious from where we sit: give PvE its own proper mode with its own progression and rewards, keep the economy separate so nobody’s farming safe loot to take into PvP, and stop pretending one toggle can keep both camps happy. Embark’s got until November to work it out. Don’t blow it.
Did you try the PvE toggle, or did you stay in the trenches? Tell us in the comments, or argue it out in the GetRekt Discord.
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