ARC Raiders Was Almost Canceled, and This Documentary Explains Why We Nearly Lost It
It is hard to believe looking at the Steam charts right now, but ARC Raiders was almost thrown in the trash bin of history.
It is incredibly rare for a studio to show off their failures. Usually, canceled prototypes are buried in a dark server room, never to be seen again.
But Embark Studios just released a video titled "Finding ARC Raiders," and it is a surprisingly honest post-mortem of the game they almost made.
It turns out Arc Raiders started as something completely different. It was a massive, 40-player co-op raid game codenamed "Pioneer." And the reason they killed it? It just wasn't fun.
The 40-Player "Shadow of the Colossus" Dream
The original pitch sounds incredible on paper. Imagine 40 players on a massive map, fighting through waves of smaller bots, all converging on a giant, 200-meter-tall boss for an epic finale.
They described it as a mix of Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead, and PUBG. You were supposed to be a hero, jumping 20 feet in the air, ripping plates off giant scarab bots, and dominating the battlefield.
It sounds like the ultimate power fantasy. But in practice, it was a mess.
The "10km Run" Problem
The devs were brutally honest about why it failed. They ran into what they called the "10km run" problem.
Players would have one amazing, cinematic session where everything clicked. And then, for the next ten sessions, they would just... run. They'd run for 10 kilometers across a huge map with nothing happening. The fun was too rare.
Even worse was the "Dead Boss" problem. You'd spend 20 minutes gearing up and running to the finale, only to arrive and find that another squad had already killed the boss. You missed the whole point of the game. It felt "cruel," but not in a good way.
From Heroes to Rats
The pivot to PvPvE changed everything. They realized that AI is predictable. Once you learn the pattern of a giant robot, it becomes boring.
But humans? Humans are terrifyingly unpredictable.
So they flipped the script. Instead of being a superhero dominating machines, you became a "rat." You became small, fragile, and scared.
The machines stopped being content to "farm" and became "noise traps." Now, fighting a machine is a risk because the noise attracts the deadliest thing on the map: other players.
The "Hail Mary" That Failed
They actually gave the old version one last shot. Leadership gave the team a 6-month "Hail Mary" deadline to prove the PvE concept could work.
They built "Milestone 12," a focused test in the Spaceport level. It was... okay. But it didn't have retention. People played it once and didn't care to come back.
That was the moment they had to make the hard call: kill it, release a bad game, or reset. They chose to reset, delaying the game and pushing The Finals out first to buy time.
It’s a bold move, and frankly, I think it paid off. The Arc Raiders we have now is tense, unique, and terrifying. But man, I would have loved to try that 40-player boss fight just once.