"Ultimately, we asked 'why are we doing this?'": the creators of Arc Raiders wildly underestimated how hard it is to make a live service game

Executive producer reflects on his own burnout at EA

Arc Raiders developers Embark heavily underestimated the challenges of creating a full-blown live service game, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal has conceded in a new interview. The extraction shooter launched with an ambition for monthly post-release updates that ultimately proved untenable, resulting in an exhausted and unhappy team who were "constantly overshooting our capacity".

The interview in question is with Game Developer, who caught up with Grøndal at Gamescom this year. Arc Raiders itself launched around a year ago, with our own reviewer Sam Horti describing it as "a deliciously tense extraction shooter that's surprisingly social and feels different every round". It subsequently became one of publisher Nexon's top earners, and has been celebrated in company investor material as a repeatable formula for a big original videogame production. According to Grøndal, however, the game's first few months after launch were a little bit murderous.

"Transitioning to live service is going to be fucking hard. Everyone said that to me," he recalled. "I've even said that to other people. I was mentally prepared for it to be hard—but I wasn't completely prepared for how hard it was.

"When you build a game up until launch, you build and you test and you build and you test and you fix things and measure results," he continued. "So the way that we've been building video games was based on that idea—but now the demands of the players are really high we feel like we really can't go much faster.

"The team is super tired," Grøndal confessed (again, bear in mind the timeframe – this year's Gamescom took place at the backend of August). "We're putting out content as fast as we can but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well. I'm proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year, but at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that."

After a blistering few months, Embark decided to revise their plans for the live service component of Arc Raiders. "We didn't have the time," Grøndal said. "You also have a lot of the cost of just maintaining the game—implementing bug fixes, exploits, and other constraints. We were constantly overshooting our capacity and so it was hard to plan when there's so much to do."

Back in May, the Arc Raiders team publicly ditched monthly updates in favour of larger, biannual additions that, according to Grøndal, try to recapture the experience of working on the game before launch.

"Ultimately, we asked 'why are we doing this?'" he told Game Developer. "Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths [...] and what we produce will be better, more interesting, and higher-quality across the board. It also gives us time to work things out instead of just shipping, shipping, shipping. We can actually iterate."

Grøndal himself is a 15-year Electronic Arts alumni who worked across the Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront series. He's no stranger to burnout. Closing the interview, Grøndal recalled being "completely broken" and having to go on sick leave for five months, after overworking to ship a Battlefield game. "It's terrible. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also, it means we lose good people who might be out for a very long time."

With a view to not going too easy on a manager speaking on behalf of his staff - and with the usual caveat that I am Professor Igno Ramus as regards the creation of any videogame, let alone a huge and frantic live service project - I feel like Grøndal could have anticipated the potential for exhausting people with the initial monthly update strategy. 15 years grinding away at Battlefield and Battlefront games is surely enough experience to be able to scope out the labour. Still, I'm glad the developers have made a public decision to give themselves an easier time of it.

What does the future hold for Arc Raiders, aside from being the work of (hopefully) more rested, contented game developers? Amongst other things, Embark are testing out a PvE mode, because some of you capricious assholes are refusing to kill each other.