PvE lobbies, briefly
Five months ago, Embark Studios told ARC Raiders players, in bold, that there were no PvE-only servers where other Raiders would never attack them. Right now there are, with a toggle on the menu, and they stay until Tuesday morning.
The PvE matchmaking test went live with Update 2.1 on October 13 and runs until 11:00 CEST on October 20. It’s a sharp turn for an extraction game built on the fear of the next player round the corner, and the paper trail shows how Embark got here.
From “Topside always carries risk” to a PvE toggle in five months
May 20. In a Steam post on how matchmaking works, Embark busted what it called myths about friendly and aggressive lobbies. One line was blunt: “There are no “PvE-only” lobbies/servers where other Raiders will never attack you.” Matchmaking could nudge you toward similar players, it said, but “Topside always carries risk.” That was a description of the game, not a promise about its future, but it’s hard to read it now without a smile.
September 24. Executive producer Aleks announced the test, and the numbers are the story. Embark says 37% of players are friendly co-op types, a group that has “grown consistently since launch”, 27% are mixed and 34% are pure PvP. More than 70% of the friendly players, and 40% of the PvP ones, want fewer hostile encounters. Overall, 51% of those surveyed said they were interested in a dedicated PvE option.
It’s possible that this will not work. This test is not a promise that there will be a PvE mode in the future, but take this as an indication that we are seriously considering it.
Aleks, executive producer, ARC Raiders
The same post admits the history that makes this awkward. ARC Raiders started life as a raid-based PvE co-op game that Embark reset because it ran into “significant challenges.” A PvE toggle, it says, risks draining the tension the game was rebuilt around, “and we can’t ignore what the data is telling us.”
October 13. The final rules post spelled out the rules. In PvE sessions there’s zero player-to-player damage, and stun and fire throwables don’t affect other players, though barricades and ziplines still work. Overall loot value is lower. Solos, duos and trios share sessions more often, and your PvPvE matchmaking rating isn’t touched.
Embark also kept a sting in the tail. ARC can re-acquire a downed player after an eight-second grace period if they catch you crawling, a deliberate bit of tension to make up for the missing human threat.
October 16. Hotfix 2.1.1 closed several ways players were getting into locked rooms and duplicating items, a reminder that the PvPvE game still has its own fairness problems to manage while attention is on the toggle. It’s been a bumpy few months on PC generally: the Windows 11 August patch that crashed ARC Raiders left Embark recommending a manual driver fix, while Arc System Works patched the same crash out of Marvel Tōkon with a game update.
What happens after Tuesday
When the test ends, the toggle is removed and matchmaking goes back to normal. Embark will send players a survey, and says the feedback and in-game data will decide whether the toggle becomes permanent. It’s asking PvP players to keep playing too, because the other half of the experiment is whether emptying out the friendly players changes the PvPvE lobbies left behind.
We think Embark is right to run this as a test rather than ship it, and right to be open about the numbers. A studio that publishes “34% pure PvP” about its own PvP game is at least being honest about who its players are.
The risk is the one Embark named: tension is ARC Raiders’ whole personality, and a menu option that switches it off might be the thing that keeps friendly players around or the thing that makes everyone else feel the game got softer. The survey lands after October 20. We’d like to see Embark publish the results the same way it published the September numbers.
