At the December 2021 Game Awards, ARC Raiders was first revealed. The game was shown as a sci-fi third person shooter from a new development team called Embark Studios, made up largely of former DICE members who worked on games in the Battlefield series. The very impressive looking trailer for the game showed players on a future Earth battling huge alien mechanical enemies in big outdoor environments.
However, Embark decided later to concentrate its development efforts on a second game, the free-to-play multiplayer first person shooter The Finals. The team held a closed beta for that game in March, which got a ton of attention thanks to its highly destructible environments.
While we wait for Embark to hopefully release The Finals publicly later in 2023, they are planning to launch a closed beta for ARC Raiders sometime this summer. People can sign up to be picked for that beta test on the game's Steam page. The page also says that ARC Raiders will be a somewhat different game than the planned PvE design that was first shown off, thanks in part to the reaction to The Finals:
Since then, over the course of development, ARC Raiders has taken the shape of what we believe to be a truly promising PvPvE survival extraction shooter — a game that stays true to the ARC Raiders universe and we’re having a blast testing internally.
ARC Raiders drops players into a lethal but stunningly beautiful future earth, with hair-raising moments of survival and suspense. Human versus machine, human versus human, together or alone, and you versus the sometimes conflicting nature of your own humanity, all in the spectacular backdrop of a landscape littered with the haunting remains of the past.
If ARC Raiders does indeed hold a closed beta this summer, players will have to sign an NDA, which means we will likely not be getting any gameplay videos or impressions as we did with The Finals closed beta test.
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