Embark discuss the game’s extraction shooter economy

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

A question I often ask game developers when I’ve run out of real questions is: what was the hardest part of making your game? Which is a terrible line of inquiry, because it’s like asking somebody with their foot in a hornet’s nest which individual hornet they dislike the most. As Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told me in a chat last week, “I can probably sit here and talk to you about all the problems we’ve had for hours on end, but yeah, game development is always tricky. That’s what I can say. There’s nothing that comes for free - everything is a constant struggle.”

Still, the question often gets an interesting response, because as readers of Alex Wiltshire’s old The Mechanic series will know, big problems often oblige inventive solutions. So, what has been the hardest part of making Arc Raiders? Perfecting the slides? Avoiding mandatory player progression resets from season to season? Dealing with reports about the game’s generative AI usage? According to Grøndal, it was trying to create an economy of loot and crafting materials - ranging from all-purpose Mechanical Components to rare or uncommon ingredients for specific guns, sometimes found in special field depots - that isn’t too “punishing” and which doesn’t just feel like accumulating “cash value”.

“The thing that we’ve probably spent the most time on was the meta game,” he told me, in an interview last week shortly before the new shooter’s release. “So like, the game economy, where all the different items that are available, what type of crafting you can do, and recipes, and making sure that we strike the right balance [so that] you don’t feel too forced to doing crafting, but also giving items enough value so you want to seek out items in the world. Because if they just represent some sort of cash value to you, then everything just boils down to ‘oh, I have this amount of cash value’.

“Whereas when you start recognising items, that represents utility value for you,” Grøndal went on. “If I collect these two items, I can actually go and craft the thing I want or need. Then, items in the world start getting more context value, and you start caring about collecting these items.

“Striking the right balance between it feeling overly punishing, and getting it right where every item has a purpose, and if you choose to, you can, you can use that purpose over time - that was probably the thing we spent the absolute longest on,” he added. “Multiple tests and rounds of feedback to strike that balance, until we feel like we have found, at least, a great starting point for it now, because these are economies that will continue to evolve over time, and we will keep adding things.”

As a more specific example of how your relationship with items might change, Grøndal pointed to certain choicer, colour-coded objects you might discover during your initial forays. “In the beginning, you’re finding fancy items that look expensive, but might actually have better utility if you break them down, to craft things that are more useful to you in the moment,” he commented. “But eventually those items start having their own value, because there’s other items that are dependent on them that you can start crafting.

“And then I at least feel - and at least, that’s the feedback we’re hearing so far - that it changes and every item becomes interesting in its own way. It doesn’t mean that you have to collect every single type of item - that’s not the purpose, but at least you can be more deliberate about what items you choose to hunt for.”

I’m often contemptuous of games that hinge on the thrill of collecting stuff in order to enhance a character or loadout. I think that games driven by material acquisition and progression tend to be either worryingly compulsive - to the point that players are conditioned to bypass more intriguing parts of the game, as they strive to optimise their gear - or extremely boring (or both, as in Diablo 4). The restive, rummaging tedium of it all is worsened when the game in question is also a live service operation that profits by keeping you churning away at the gear or level-up treadmill.

At the same time, I think my apathy for such things lacks nuance. I often disregard the cleverness of in-game economies and how they can be tuned to create specific moods, or support particular stories. To reach for an overfamiliar example of Doing It Right, the Dark Souls games ravel together a whole mythology through their kit, and their levels are more fascinating for the cunning arrangement of trinkets, including what we might otherwise dismissively call “farming” opportunities.

Arc Raiders is a very different kind of game, but Grøndal’s remarks make me hopeful that it might conjure a similar mystique, perhaps in concert with Embark’s unfolding of the game’s backstory via narrative quests and codex entries, and specifically the origins of the marauding ARC robots.

“For the person who is willing to look, there’s a lot of things in the world to observe, so there’s a lot of environmental storytelling that you start puzzle things together and what’s happening,” Grøndal told me. “And again, this is just the start of the game - we have a pretty ambitious plan about how we want to continue telling the narrative, and evolving the game over time through different means.”