The problem with playtesting is that it is impossible to predict every last thing any given person may do once a game is out in the wild. It’s an imperfect science where you do the best you can in the moment. I imagine a live service game like Arc Raiders to be extra difficult, given how many playstyles need to be accounted for. And based on a recent interview, it sounds like some of the team at Embark took an approach that involved a randomiser determining their own playstyle from day to day to make sure they weren’t just playing one way.
The reason for this, according to an interview with production director Caio Braga over at GamesRadar, is that the devs “played quite aggressively internally. In our play tests, we are more PvP-leaning, but every now and then our team tries outright not to play PvP and to be a bit more friendly.” Braga explained that one of the shooter’s weapon designers was particularly eager to keep the game’s don’t shoot emote in, causing a bit of debate.
“We’re adding PvP. We play very aggressively. Who is going to use this? Maybe we shouldn’t do that. Let them customize everything. And that was one of the moments where the team said, ‘No, no, we believe players will use this.’ And it’s there and now people really like that and use it.”
In considering how aggressively and PvP focused the dev team is, and because they’re playtesting every day, Braga then decided to start using a randomiser to decide how he should play for the day. “So one day I’m playing as a Care Bear, the other day I’m very aggressive,” Braga said. “Sometimes I’m doing just quests. Some people in the team also use that randomizer just to try to put themselves in the shoes of those players and see what would be nice for them. We’re building it for fun, right? We want to provide as much fun as we can. So it’s good to understand all of those players.”
It seems like such a tactic has more-or-less worked out for Embark, given that there seems to be a healthy community of folks that quite happily avoid PvP, even if they’re always at risk of it. Whether such balancing can be maintained forever in a live service game is another question, but that’s a question we’ll come back to in a few years.
