Nexon subsidiary Embark Studios will attend the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2026, to be held this March in San Francisco, and present on its new title ARC Raiders—including the game’s reboot process—alongside examples of next-generation AI technology and pipeline innovation. The goal of these talks is to go beyond technical achievements and share Embark Studios’ production philosophy with the industry—one that asks what “fun” fundamentally means in games.

ARC Raiders has surpassed 14 million units in cumulative global sales. In January, it recorded a peak concurrent user count of 960,000. Looking at user-evaluation metrics, 87% of approximately 332,000 total reviews are positive, maintaining a “Very Positive” rating. According to data from the global review aggregation site OpenCritic, ARC Raiders previously earned a “Mighty” rating with a 93% critics-recommendation score.

Embark Studios developer Caio Braga will deliver a talk titled, “When Your AAA Game Isn’t Fun: The Story of ARC Raiders Starting Over from Scratch with Clear Intent.” The session focuses on how the team responded after confronting internal assessments that, despite strong technology and high-end visual fidelity, the game simply wasn’t fun.

Rather than reacting passively to external feedback, Braga diagnosed the issues through structured internal playtests and surveys. He redesigned the project by prioritizing clear design intent and core pillars over sprawling design documents. Through GDC’s official session materials, he plans to share the leadership approach and practical production philosophy that enabled the team to preserve trust while resetting a large-scale project budgeted in the tens of billions of won.

The studio will also reveal game AI technology that goes beyond script-based behavior to systems that learn on their own. Developer Martin Singh-Blom, in a session titled “Learning to Move: Physics-Based Enemy Character Locomotion in ARC Raiders,” will explain the technical foundation behind machine enemies that move naturally. Moving away from conventional animation playback, the team combined reinforcement learning with a physics engine, presenting optimization know-how that lets AI recognize terrain and teach itself how to walk and fight.

Singh-Blom will also participate as a panelist in a machine-learning forum alongside experts from major global game companies. That forum will discuss how machine learning can be applied across the broader game industry—such as simulation and tool development—reinforcing Embark’s standing as a technology-leading studio.

Developers Erik Östsjö and Björn Arvidsson will present “Freedom Through Structure: Embark’s Character Pipeline,” introducing how they built a work environment designed to maximize artist creativity. By combining Houdini with Universal Scene Description (USD), they replaced repetitive manual tasks with procedural generation and automation. They will share concrete, real-world examples of how technical artists and generalist artists collaborate in the same space to increase creative freedom.

Embark Studios developer Tom van Dijck will join security experts from Amazon Games and Denuvo to discuss strategies for building the latest multi-layered anti-cheat ecosystem. The panel addresses a security philosophy that, while adopting powerful kernel-level cheat detection, the anti-cheat system should remain effectively invisible to legitimate users. Through GDC’s official session description, van Dijck plans to propose ways to build a frictionless play environment that balances security with user convenience.

Embark Studios’ GDC sessions are set to showcase technical accomplishments—maximizing productivity through cutting-edge machine learning and procedural pipelines—while also highlighting a creative achievement: making a bold reset in service of the game’s core fun. Together, these are expected to demonstrate a new development paradigm that strengthens parent company Nexon’s global competitiveness.

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