On the face of it, Arc Raiders has enjoyed a dream year for a live-service game. It launched to huge numbers, then maintained the community while developer Embark Studios maintained a cadence of updates and patches to keep things (mostly) steady. As the shooter’s first anniversary approaches, leadership is now getting candid about the toll that’s taken on the devs.
Aleksander Grøndal, executive producer on Arc Raiders, discusses Embark’s general weariness with Game Developer. “Transitioning to live-service is going to be fucking hard,” he says.
“Everyone said that to me. I’ve even said that to other people,” he continues. “I was mentally prepared for it to be hard – but I wasn’t completely prepared for how hard it was.”
Prior to Arc Raiders, Grøndal worked on a number of major releases for EA, including installments of Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront. While these have online elements, they’ve got substantial offline options too, making them different animals to the fully live-service machine of something like Arc Raiders.
He mentions that the people at Embark have been worn down by having to answer to millions of players on a consistent and ongoing basis. “The team is super tired. We’re putting out content as fast as we can but it’s not enough, and perhaps it wasn’t necessarily interesting enough as well,” he comments. “I’m proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year, but at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that.”
Arc Raiders jumped out of the gate with monthly updates that kept the gameplay fresh, while putting out fires constantly through routine patches. But Embark has since slowed down, aiming for slower but bigger rollouts on new features.
“We didn’t have the time,” he says. “You also have a lot of the cost of just maintaining the game – implementing bug fixes, exploits, and other constraints. We were constantly overshooting our capacity and so it was hard to plan when there’s so much to do.”
He candidly adds the “team were super unhappy,” for a stretch and that bled into player dissatisfaction too. Having served his time at Electronic Arts, he points toward his experience there as something he wants to avoid for any of his colleagues. “It’s super important [to protect people]. I can tell you a personal story. I was burned out,” he remembers.
“We’d just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken,” he says, later putting a fine point on what he’s getting at: “It’s very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance.”