Embark Thinks ARC Raiders Players are Defeating Matriarchs “Too Early,” Admits it Gave Players “Too Effective Abilities” Against the Giants

When you start your journey in ARC Raiders, certain ARCs, like Rocketeers and Bastion's, can send a chill down the spine of any new Raider. You'll eventually learn how to take these machines down, but there's always something bigger waiting in the wings, and in this new extraction shooter, that 'something bigger' is the Matriarchs.

They're the closest thing ARC Raiders has to a boss encounter. You can't take them down yourself (not without some serious luck and know-how), and they're arguably the most deadly machines you'll face as far as the game's PvE elements are concerned. But that hasn't stopped players from figuring out how to take them down, and how to do it very, very quickly, especially when an entire server is charging the six-legged giants.

According to Embark Studios, however, that's not how fights against Matriarchs are supposed to go. At least, not when you're still early in your in-game journey. They're meant to be tough encounters that you'll struggle with, even with mid-tier gear. But since when have players done something precisely the way game designers intended them to?

As Embark Studios' design director, Virgil Watkins, admits in an interview with PC Gamer, working with that assumption is on the team at Embark for making players "too effective" in the early game with the kinds of abilities they have at their disposal.

"Even though [Queens and Matriarchs are] huge and deadly, they're not intended for the full server to go up against and get equally rewarded. It is meant to be, you know, a couple of dedicated squads, maybe working together while also dealing with other players," Watkins said. "That's definitely on us to an extent...I think we gave players too effective abilities to take down these things too early. So they were tuned more for what I would call mid-game gear."

Now, this doesn't mean you can expect a future update where Matriarchs and Queens get a huge buff. That might be part of the solution for Embark, but it's not the whole picture. The team would rather have a solution that addresses the different playstyles they're seeing from Raiders to better address the problem.

"Do we reward the people who might pick their moment well, and go get some scraps from part of the fight and then sneak away?...Are you going to be the guy who capitalizes at the end of the fight because everyone's worn down and out of ammo, or are you the one who's trying to pull everyone together and have the fight on even terms?"

It's not just these boss encounters that Embark is looking to tweak. The Hidden Bunker and Locked Gate activities are also something the studio wants to change, because it's noticed that players will just wait by the doors, waiting for them to be opened by someone else, rather than go out and properly engage with the challenge of crossing the map to get the appropriate keys themselves.

"When we built them, we had an idealized way we hoped people would engage. And then, you know, as players always do, they find this sort of meta throughline," Watkins said. "That's where we can go look at those existing map conditions...it's about us trying to keep the spirit of those, but adjust the mechanics."

Essentially, if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of players signing on to play ARC Raiders every day, expect to see some changes to how the game operates going forward, with the game seemingly leaning towards becoming even more challenging. Hopefully, Embark is able to keep the game fun and engaging without overdoing it.

And if you're a player who took severe advantage of the coins duplication glitch, you can probably expect a suspension coming your way in the near future.

For more on ARC Raiders, check out all of our news, guides, and review coverage in our hub page for the game.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.