About 30% of Arc Raiders players focus on PvE, and Embark’s happy with that: ‘We want to instil hope in the player’

Here is the conversation around Arc Raiders, presented as a play in one act. Player One: “I like the PvE, and I only want to experience the PvE.” Player Two: “I like the PvP actually and I should be allowed to shoot you.” Player One: “You’re toxic.” Player Two: “No, you’re toxic.” Curtains.

According to figures Embark Studios has shared with the Guardian, the same percentage of Arc Raiders players are focused on the co-op as the PvP. It’s roughly 30% for each, with the leftover 40% in the “why not both” camp.

“It caught us a little bit by surprise,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal said. As Embark has explained before, they did not expect such a passionate PvE-only community to spring up around their action shooter, but are “Pleasantly surprised, just to be clear.”

Arc Raiders is designed to allow for co-operation—another fun figure from the Guardian article is that over 95% of players use the proximity chat—and enemies like the Matriarch were introduced to give players even more reason to team up. Though the speed of co-operation when the Matriarch was first introduced still surprised the developers. “In an instant—like literally in less than 30 seconds—everyone on that server stopped shooting each other and faced the bigger challenge together,” Grøndal said. “And I hadn’t really anticipated the fact that every single one would cooperate that easily in a 30-second timeframe.”

It’s the opposite of what happened with DayZ. When it was only available in Dean Hall’s native New Zealand, DayZ was defined by friendly co-operation. Then it opened up to the rest of the world, and suddenly became a hellscape of robbery and torture. New Zealanders are just that much nicer than everyone else, I guess.

According to Grøndal, the look and feel of Arc Raiders is partially responsible for the community it’s created. “Yes, the Arcs have captured the surface and they’re the dominant. But if you look around you, nature has come back from an ecological collapse,” he said. “The animals are back and the world is thriving. We want to instil hope in the player.”