Arc Raiders technical director Virgil Watkins has said that Arc Raiders’s April playtest coinciding with Marathon’s previous closed beta was a coincidence, but acted as “a very great A/B test” for Embark Studios’ own extraction shooter.
Arc Raiders, which recently had its final open beta – the server slam – ahead of its launch on the 30th October, has been in development for a good while. The game has drummed up a lot of hype during that time, but certainly gained a surge of excitement around it, in part due the prior beta’s proximity to Marathon’s initial showing. Players could compare and contrast both games, and found Marathon wanting.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Watkins expanded on his perspective on this moment, and what it meant for the team at Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios.
Watkins said: “It was very coincidental that they had their test around the time we did. To my knowledge, I don’t think any of us knew that was going to happen. It was a very great A/B test for us, because obviously they made decisions that we didn’t, and vice versa. So we could kind of compare and contrast how some of those things shook out.”
Fast forward to last weekend, and these two games that were once head-to-head rivals couldn’t be further apart in terms of public opinion. The aforementioned Arc Raiders server slam managed to reach almost 100,000 concurrent players within its opening hours on PC alone, further cementing the positive sentiment around the title.
Marathon, on the other hand, remains in limbo. After its first public test, players were torn on certain design decisions made to the game, a lack of solo queue or proximity chat standing out as especially jarring absences. Following this, Marathon was at the centre of a plagiarism scandal, with many of its visual assets seemingly based on an outside-artists’ work.
The game was then delayed from its initial September release, but will soon be playable again in a fresh open beta test, running from 22nd – 27th October. This’ll be Marathons next big chance to win back interest after an especially shaky start.
It’ll be concluding right as Arc Raiders releases too, in what seems to be an ongoing dance between the two extraction shooters. Will Arc Raiders suck all the oxygen out of the genre? Or can Marathon scrape back some goodwill? All may be decided this month.
