Arc Raiders devs seek buffs for terrible skills: “We know. There are some skills I don’t choose… we’re not deaf to the state of things.”
To say the least, several skills in Arc Raiders’ raider skill tree seem better than others. To put it mildly, as I told design lead Virgil Watkins in a recent interview, player testing has revealed that several skills have an indiscernible impact on gameplay. Fortunately, Watkins says that Embark is “not deaf” to the sad state of these unkind skills, and that the buffs are “100% on our radar.” (Here are our picks for the best skills in Arc Raiders.)
“I think even internally we know that,” he says. “There are some skills that I don’t choose. So yes, 100%. I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t any that need work. It will be something that changes again. I won’t say when or in what nature, but we are not deaf to the state of things.”
The irony here is that Embark cannot create all the skills, collectively, too good partly because of the way shipping works. Completing an expedition and gently wiping out your character earns you up to five additional skill points to use in future cycles – at least for now, until that point’s reward eventually ends. This brings cumulative advantages over time and risks seeing veteran expedition runners develop an increasing advantage over less experienced players.
Along similar lines, Embark doesn’t want level 75 players to absolutely decimate newcomers. This is probably why we don’t have skills for things like max health or gun damage – those should be untouched constants. (The closest thing may be extra stamina, which I think everyone should get.) Putting time and effort into learning more skills should earn you some reward and gameplay advantage, but Watkins suggests that Embark wants to be careful not to let that reward and advantage become too great.
“That’s the danger, and that’s why skill points go all the way to that line of, ‘Do I have a clear advantage over another player?'” he says. “So it would have to be quite deliberate. The intention right now is that skill points aren’t going to be a reward forever with Expeditions, they’re going to be limited at some point to whatever makes sense. The intention is that if you’ve done enough Expeditions to have, say, the full complement of extra skill points at your disposal, maybe you have some slight quality of life changes, like, I can have this little bit of extra stamina and still do security breaches and maybe move more silently, or whatever. The constellation of those points you allocated is. But it shouldn’t be like you’ve maxed out two branches of the skill tree and it doesn’t matter anymore for the rest.
I asked Watkins about specific skills that might be in Embark’s crosshairs for potential buffs, or skills that he’s avoiding himself. My mind went to two places: movement skills which seem to have an extremely negligible impact on your speed or stamina, and melee skills which literally do nothing when you’re not actively hitting something with a hammer, which will make up the majority of the game when most enemies are flying or can instantly fry you if you’re in hammer range. His mind turns to the latter category.
“For me, maybe someone will disagree, but those who are focused on melee hits on certain things, like taking [Arc] all at once and stuff like that. If I remember correctly, back when we were starting to build a skill tree, the way the melee system was then and the way certain things played out, it was a little more hands-on. But then, once you see how people actually engage with the game and the distances at which they prefer to face things, it all kinda falls by the wayside.
“There are others, of course, we can just look at adjusting them. Like some of those that, even if you put the full five skill points into it, still don’t have a very clear impact on how you actually play moment to moment. Yeah, we can see what we do with that.”
Arc Raiders had an auction house-style trading system at one point, but Embark removed it because it ruined loot: “It turned the game into just about coins.”
