With the full release of Embark Studios’ new extraction shooter ARC Raiders set for the 30th, the studio has shared the behind-the-scenes story of how the game has changed since its originally planned 2022 launch—three years of twists, turns, and hard decisions.

First unveiled in 2021, ARC Raiders was conceived as a PvE game about teaming up to bring down towering machines. As it stands on the cusp of release today, however, it has been completely reimagined as a PvPvE experience. In an interview with Edge magazine, CEO Patrick Söderlund spoke candidly about the lengthy delay and why the team rebuilt the game’s core gameplay.

When ARC Raiders’ explosive trailer debuted at The Game Awards in 2021, Söderlund says he himself was “so into it that I thought, ‘I just want to play that game already.’” But the reality of the playable build felt nothing like the trailer. External playtesters—and internal tests—said the same thing.

Söderlund loved every aspect the studio set out to design. That’s why it took so long to reach a conclusion. But there came a moment when he had to say, “Guys, this game is not fun.” Getting more specific, he explains that “the PvE action could be fun sometimes, but not nearly often enough.” On average, that spark might happen once in 50 play sessions—nowhere near a shippable state.

Executive Producer Aleksander Grøndal joined the studio during this period. On paper, he was supposed to help polish and ship the game over its final six months. Reality had other plans. Six months out from the target date, ARC Raiders went back to first principles—and emerged with the PvPvE gameplay it has today.

One intriguing wrinkle: much of Embark’s team hails from DICE, veterans of PvP-heavy series like Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront. Some had grown weary of building PvP games and even vowed they’d never “make PvP again” after leaving DICE.

And yet—never say never. The team ultimately returned to the PvP domain they knew best, while giving ARC Raiders its own identity by making colossal machines a shared, ever-present threat. Söderlund says he understands why fans initially criticized the pivot, but believes that if they’d seen the previous version, the decision would “make sense.”

The payoff for pushing the release back three years arrived with this April’s technical test. Across the test window, players worldwide completed roughly 5.93 million rounds and destroyed over 7 million ARCs. The community has responded to ARC Raiders’ new direction: within a day of pre-orders opening, it broke into the global top 10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart, and it currently sits at #5 on the Steam wishlist rankings.

To mark the pre-order campaign in Korea, Nexon, the game’s local publishing partner, is running a promotion for Korean players. Purchasing an ARC Raiders Steam key via the official Nexon website triggers a payback event: buyers of the Standard Edition receive ₩10,000 in Nexon Cash, and Deluxe Edition buyers receive ₩20,000 in Nexon Cash. In addition, new members of the co-branded Nexon Hyundai Card and Nexon Hyundai Card UNLIMITED who purchase a Steam key with that card receive 50,000 points, with an extra 100,000 points if cumulative spending reaches ₩200,000 or more by November 14.

ARC Raiders launches on October 30 for PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and via cloud streaming on NVIDIA GeForce NOW.

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.