Despite the huge success of April’s playtest, the developers decided not to rush the game — sticking firmly to their original release schedule.

The sci-fi extraction shooter Arc Raiders is holding its final public test this weekend before its official release at the end of October. Many players believed the game was already ready to launch after the well-received April playtest, which even outperformed Marathon’s test at the time. However, the developers kept to their initial plan — an October release that had not yet been publicly announced — because, according to design director Virgil Watkins, the game simply wasn’t finished.

Since that playtest, several new features have been added to the later stages of the game. The Trials system introduces new challenges and a leaderboard to enhance progression. The Expedition Project, explained by Watkins in a recent blog post, is Arc’s response to server resets. Instead of wiping everyone’s progress, Expeditions allow dedicated players to voluntarily give up their progression in exchange for what Watkins calls a “Zen” state — meaning they forfeit weapon attachments, special account unlocks, and other yet-to-be-finalized rewards. The system is somewhat similar to Call of Duty’s Prestige mode, which lets players reset all progress and start again from level one purely for bragging rights.

“It was interesting to see how many people wanted us to release the game right away, or shortly after the playtest,” Watkins told PC Gamer. “But the game was absolutely not ready on our end. I’m glad people thought it was in good shape, but we still had a lot of optimization to do, plenty of features to finish, and some serious bugs that, thankfully, didn’t appear in most of the footage. We had a lot to fix.”

Watkins added that while the playtest was well received, the internal telemetry data showed otherwise. “We know certain things weren’t working the way they should have. Since Tech Test 2, we’ve added a new map, teased a fifth one that players will get to explore shortly after launch, and expanded both item and enemy pools. We also introduced new map conditions — players saw the night raids and a few other features in Tech Test 2 — and we’ve built on those to deliver fresh gameplay experiences,” he said.

Arc Raiders is scheduled to launch on October 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. Developer Embark Studios abandoned its original free-to-play model last year in favor of a $40 price tag. According to Watkins, this change was a relief, as it allowed the team to focus on crafting enjoyable progression and crafting systems instead of constantly relying on cosmetic microtransactions.

Source: PCGamer