Summary
PC Gamer interview with Embark Studios art director Robert Sammelin about player behavior in the PvPvE extraction shooter Arc Raiders. Sammelin reports that players are substantially more cooperative than the development team expected — and more cooperative than the devs themselves were during internal playtests. Player-on-player kill figures are “surprisingly low.” Some maps (notably Stella Montis) host more aggressive lobbies, which aligns with the game’s aggression-based matchmaking system.
Key Points
- Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter where players benefit economically from other players dying (corpse loot)
- Despite that incentive, cooperative play dominates — strangers coordinating against environmental “arc” threats
- Sammelin: “internally we were hoping that we would strike this balance… play testing with devs, we’re way worse people than the community when it comes to how we engage in combat”
- Player-downed-by-player statistics are described as surprisingly low
- Squad vs. solo play produces “very different experience[s]” — solo play tends toward cooperation
- Stella Montis map hosts more PvP-heavy lobbies, including player-built death traps
- Dev emotional response: “heartwarming… really uplifting to see”
Newsletter Angles
- Cooperation as Default, Sociopathy as Design Choice: The Arc Raiders data is a counterpoint to the standard “humans are wolves under the mask” framing. When cooperation is structurally possible — even when the reward system nominally favors predation — players default to it. The sociopathic meta in Tarkov and similar games may be a design artifact, not human nature.
- Game Theory in Public: This pairs directly with Justin’s game-theory work on cooperation dynamics. Arc Raiders is a live experiment in whether “greed for loot” binds strangers together more tightly than it pulls them apart. Empirically: it binds.
- Power and Infrastructure: Sammelin’s observation that developers were “worse” than the community is itself notable — the people who designed the incentive structure defaulted to predation; the people who received it as a given defaulted to cooperation. Structure shapes behavior, but not in the direction the designers expected.
Entities Mentioned
- Embark Studios — developer of Arc Raiders; Stockholm-based
- Robert Sammelin — Embark art director
- Arc Raiders — the game
Concepts Mentioned
- Cooperative Game Design — structural choices that reward non-predation
- Aggression-Based Matchmaking — the system that sorts PvP-inclined players together
- Prisoner’s Dilemma in Games — the standard frame Arc Raiders defies
Quotes
“Internally we were hoping that we would strike this balance of having people almost apprehensive on how they’re going to interact with other people… the greater exterior threat with the arcs would perhaps invite these sorts of cooperative scenarios.” — Robert Sammelin
“Internally, play testing with devs, we’re way worse people than the community when it comes to how we engage in combat.” — Robert Sammelin
“Seeing how people treat each other socially is heartwarming, it is really uplifting to see.” — Robert Sammelin
Notes
PC Gamer is Tier 3 gaming press — fine for first-party developer quotes and community observations, less reliable for rigorous game-theory claims. The “surprisingly low” player-kill figure is offered without specifics; deeper data would require Embark releasing telemetry. Pair with the matchmaking source (Arc Raiders aggression-based matchmaking — PC Gamer) for the full picture.