Embark Studios has a reputation for letting people try things, even if those people were not officially assigned to the task. At GDC, production director Caio Braga explained how that messy freedom actually helped shape Arc Raiders. The game's development stretched over seven years and went through several reboots. In that chaos, small, unsolicited fixes sometimes became core features.

Long development, lots of change

Arc Raiders spent years in flux. The team kept returning to a couple of core design goals: make the world feel immersive and keep the game accessible. Those pillars guided decisions, but they did not stop developers from trying their own ideas. Weapons in particular were frequently reworked as the team chased those two goals.

The reload system that one developer rebuilt

At one point the way guns reloaded became a heated discussion. Instead of waiting for a formal assignment, one developer took matters into their own hands and rebuilt the reload system. That unofficial solution matched Embark's immersion and accessibility goals, so the team adopted it.

Braga put it plainly: "We do that all the time," and he used the term guerilla dev for these kinds of contributions. His point: if the whole studio understands the guiding pillars, someone outside a small working group can still come up with a better solution.

More guerilla wins

The reload overhaul is not an isolated story. Braga shared a few other examples of individual contributions reshaping the game:

  • The Leaper redesign: Machine learning engineers helped crack realistic movement, but the enemy called the Leaper still looked off. One artist said, "The problem is not the machine learning, it's not the animation, it's not locomotion, it's just the anatomy is not right for this gait," then redesigned the creature to better match its movement.
  • New weapon ideas: Some guns, like the Kettle, came from one-off experiments. Developers tried odd concepts, including a pressure-based weapon, and some of those experiments stuck while many others were discarded.

Why this works

Braga argued that allowing people outside a project to participate creates a richer set of solutions. Embark welcomes these efforts as long as they stay aligned with the studio's design pillars and the team can integrate them. The studio also happily kills ideas that do not work, which Braga says is a healthy part of development.

So if you think a reload feels wrong, or a monster walks oddly, it might be because someone at Embark quietly fixed it mid-development. Sometimes the best fixes come from the person who just could not wait.