Embark Studios has talked about special “high-value” raids for Arc Raiders, but the team is wary of making content that excludes or separates friends. Design lead Virgil Watkins told GamesRadar the studio has explored criteria-based queueing and examples from other games, like the labs in Escape from Tarkov, as inspiration.
One proposal discussed would gate certain map variants behind a minimum starting loadout value. Watkins and the interviewer sketched out a sample figure of around 40,000 coins as a threshold. By contrast, Watkins estimated that budget or free loadouts sit at roughly 4,000 to 5,000 coins. That gap would make the high-value runs a fairly different experience from free-loadout matches.
Watkins said the idea is appealing because it would raise the baseline for everyone in a given raid. “I completely get the sentiment,” he said. “You want to feel like, ‘Yeah, I’m coming in loaded, and I know everybody else in there’s gonna be loaded.’ And let’s have that moment for us, rather than this dude with a Stitcher dropping from the ceiling randomly on us.” At the same time, Watkins warned that the studio does not want to “segment the player base too much.” He explained the concern plainly: “We don’t want to put people in situations like, ‘Hey, we’re trying to play together, but I don’t have the criteria to go play with you and now we can’t play together.’” That co-op friction is one of the primary reasons Embark is hesitant to lock friends out of content.
The high-value raid idea could be implemented as a variant on existing maps, perhaps as part of hourly map modifiers or event rotations. Practical issues remain, such as players gaming the value calculation with pricey but weak items, and the social cost of forcing experienced players to transfer gear to less-experienced friends before joining a run. Embark’s concern about matchmaking and player behavior ties into other design work the studio has discussed publicly. The team has plans around buffing underused raider skills, and it already uses aggression-based signals in matchmaking to group players with similar playstyles. Readers can find more on those topics in our pieces about buffing weak raider skills and aggression-based matchmaking.
For now, Embark has left high-value raids on the table as a possibility rather than a plan. Watkins said the studio will be careful if it pursues gear-based entry requirements so players can still team up and access the content they want.
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ARC Raiders
Developed by Embark Studios
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer, extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC.
- Genre: Shooter
- Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5
- Modes: Multiplayer, Co-operative
- Release: 2025-10-30
- Publisher: Embark Studios
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Age Rating:
ESRB T / PEGI 16 / GRAC 15+ / USK 18 / CLASS_IND 14 / ACB M
- IGDB Rating: 89.7/100
