ARC Raiders Nearly Pivoted Back to Full PvE After Early PvP Backlash, Embark Reveals

Embark Studios has revealed that ARC Raiders came much closer than many fans realized to abandoning its PvPvE direction after the studio’s first round of post pivot testing. According to a new report from PC Gamer, production director Caio Braga said at GDC 2026 that Embark saw “substantial negative PvP sentiment” after introducing PvP during a major reset of the game, to the point where the team seriously questioned whether adding PvP had been the right decision at all.

That is a major admission because ARC Raiders’ evolution is already one of the more dramatic pivot stories in recent live service development. The project was first introduced as a co op PvE shooter, then later reemerged as a paid PvPvE extraction shooter. What Braga’s talk adds is the missing middle chapter: after that shift, Embark nearly lost confidence and considered turning back. As PC Gamer recounts from the presentation, the early player response appeared blunt enough that the studio’s internal reaction became, essentially, “They didn’t like the PvP.”

Braga’s more important point, however, is that the team eventually realized the problem was not actually PvP in isolation. After deeper review, Embark concluded that the real source of frustration was weapon balancing, the feel of PvP combat, and the way solo players and squads were being matched against each other. Once those issues were addressed through tuning and separate queues, the studio felt the design direction started to click.

That detail makes ARC Raiders’ success more interesting, because it suggests the game’s current identity was not rescued by blind stubbornness. It was rescued by correctly diagnosing what players actually hated. There is a big difference between “players reject PvP” and “players reject unfair or unsatisfying PvP,” and Embark seems to have learned that difference at exactly the right moment. This is an inference drawn from Braga’s comments as reported by PC Gamer.

It also helps explain why ARC Raiders still supports two very different player fantasies at once. Even after release, PC Gamer notes that the PvP versus PvE debate never fully disappeared, with many players still asking for a dedicated PvE mode. At the same time, the game’s community has organically developed more cooperative, lower aggression playstyles in some lobbies, preserving part of the original PvE spirit inside a PvPvE structure. That tension may actually be one of the reasons ARC Raiders feels more alive than a cleaner, more rigid design would have.

From a design standpoint, this is one of the more valuable lessons to come out of GDC 2026. Player feedback can be directionally useful while still being misleading on the surface. If Embark had taken the earliest testing response at face value, ARC Raiders might have become a completely different game. Instead, the studio dug deeper, found the underlying pain points, and kept the more ambitious version alive.

That does not mean the argument is settled forever. ARC Raiders still seems destined to live with this split audience, one side embracing the tension and unpredictability of PvPvE, the other still longing for a purer cooperative version. But in hindsight, Embark’s decision not to reverse course now looks like one of the defining bets behind the game’s identity.

What do you think, did Embark make the right call by sticking with PvPvE, or would ARC Raiders be stronger today with a full PvE mode?