Arc Raiders Devs 'Super Tired' After Huge Launch, Lead Reveals

Ever wondered what it's really like to keep a massive live-service game running? Arc Raiders' executive producer Aleksander Grøndal just pulled back the curtain, and it's not all celebratory cake and confetti.

In a candid chat with Game Developer, Grøndal admitted that while Arc Raiders launched to huge numbers and maintained a steady community, the toll on the dev team was brutal. "Transitioning to live-service is going to be fucking hard," he said. "Everyone said that to me. 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."

Before Arc Raiders, Grøndal worked on big EA titles like Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront. Those games have online components, but they also offer substantial offline experiences. Arc Raiders, however, is a fully live-service machine, and that difference is night and day. The team has been worn down by having to answer to millions of players on a consistent, ongoing basis.

"The team is super tired," Grøndal said. "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."

Arc Raiders burst out of the gate with monthly updates that kept gameplay fresh, while constantly putting out fires with routine patches. But Embark has since slowed down, aiming for slower but bigger rollouts on new features. "We didn't have the time," Grøndal explained. "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."

He also admitted the "team were super unhappy" for a stretch, and that dissatisfaction bled into the player base too. Having served time at EA, Grøndal is determined to avoid repeating that experience for his colleagues. "It's super important [to protect people]. I can tell you a personal story. I was burned out," he remembered. "We'd just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken." He added, "It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance."

As Arc Raiders approaches its first anniversary, it's clear the road hasn't been easy. The team is now focusing on sustainable development, even if it means slower content drops. What do you think about the challenges of live-service development? Will you be sticking with Arc Raiders for the long haul?