"All of a sudden you're playing a Souls game, and your weapons mean nothing."
That's Caio Braga, production director at Embark Studios, describing what happened when the Arc enemy team got tired of watching their carefully crafted AI get absolutely shredded during internal playtests of Arc Raiders. What started as a healthy creative tension between development factions turned into something far more chaotic , a recurring internal arms race that the team apparently ran on a daily basis.
When the Weapon Team Met the Arc Team
Braga laid out the whole saga during his GDC 2026 panel, When Your AAA Game Isn't Fun: The ARC Raiders Story of Starting Over with Intent, and the details are equal parts funny and revealing about how messy big game development actually gets.
Here's the thing: Arc Raiders was built with a lot of internal autonomy. Different production factions each had their own vision for what the game should be, and playtests were the arena where those visions clashed. Braga called these recurring showdowns "the playtest battles."
The weapon team would tune their guns to feel incredible. Raiders would melt Arc enemies like butter, physics would fly everywhere, and it felt fantastic. Then the Arc AI team would watch that playtest, feel personally attacked, and quietly crank enemy stats to absurd levels for the next session.
"Next playtest, the Arc team was super upset that all their effort on the enemy AI were putting, basically, to the ground with weapons," Braga explained. "So, they tuned the Arc, and, all of a sudden you're playing a Souls game."
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Braga's comments came from the GDC 2026 panel attended by GamesRadar+, where Embark Studios detailed the turbulent development history behind Arc Raiders.
From Extraction Shooter to Accidental FromSoftware Game
The Elden Ring comparison isn't just a throwaway quip. When the Arc AI team had their revenge, weapons apparently became nearly meaningless against enemies tuned to boss-tier aggression. One playtest you're confidently clearing zones; the next, you're getting punished for every mistake like you just walked into Margit with a starting dagger.
Braga confirmed this wasn't a one-time incident. "We were doing that on a daily basis," he said. The weapon team and the Arc team essentially kept escalating against each other in an endless loop, each playtest a new battle in an ongoing cold war fought entirely through game balance sliders.
What's wild is that this kind of internal conflict isn't unusual in game development, but the sheer regularity of it at Embark speaks to how fragmented the Arc Raiders vision was for years. As detailed in the full GDC account from GamesRadar+, different teams genuinely believed in fundamentally different games, and playtests became the proving ground for each faction's argument.
Raiders vs Arc in the field
A Chaotic Development That Eventually Found Its Shape
The playtest battles were just one symptom of a much larger identity crisis at Embark. The studio spent years fighting over whether Arc Raiders was a battle royale, a co-op Souls-like, a hero looter shooter, or something else entirely. At one point the team was cut down to just 25 people as publisher Nexon gave them one final shot to salvage the project.
The version that shipped is a PvPvE extraction shooter where Arc enemies and enemy players both pose real threats. The key here is that the final balance between weapon feel and enemy aggression , the exact thing those warring teams were fighting over , ended up mattering enormously to the shipped game's identity.
Players are already pushing that balance in interesting directions post-launch, with the community coordinating to take down larger Arc enemies faster than Embark intended. The devs have since acknowledged they're looking at ways to escalate the PvE challenge, which sounds a lot like the Arc AI team finally getting another turn at the playtest controls. Make sure to check out more:
