The biggest ‘will they, won’t they’ in gaming right now involves Arc Raiders and whether it will finally add a PvE mode. All seemed promising after a very successful PvE test during the start of Frozen Trial, but news has since petered out, with Embark saying it needs a bit more time to figure everything out.

I thought this meant Embark needed time to get all its ducks in a row and figure out the logistics of a permanent PvE mode, but it turns out that adding one isn’t actually that hard.

“We could just frankly add PvE,” Embark’s CEO Patrick Söderlund says in an interview with The Game Business. “It’s not a difficult thing to do. But we didn’t want to obstruct or fiddle too much with the core loop of the game where the PvP aspect of a PvPvE game does add, we believe, adequate tension.”

The biggest issue concerning a PvE mode is what it means for the game itself. The whole point of Arc Raiders being PvPvE is so players suffer even more tension as you never know when you’re going to be jumped by an arc or other player. PvE obviously removes one of those threats, and the worry is that “by removing one substantial component, you’re fiddling with the core emotional loop.” Something that Embark has previously decided “was not the right thing to do”.

“We’ve now since tried it and realised that it’s fine,” Söderlund adds. “Maybe people can choose what they like. But that was our fear all along. People may have been wondering, ‘why the hell aren’t they just doing what some players were looking for?’ We were looking at the holistic picture, which we have to do. And to protect the creative integrity of what we have created.”

I understand the draw to maintaining the creative vision, but unfortunately there are compromises to be made in a live service game. After releasing a game to players a certain amount of control gets handed away also, because in order to encourage players to come back and keep playing your game you need to give them what they want.

“We’re going through that data right now,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal says. “What we did see, which was really interesting, is that there was a huge amount of interest in it, and there were a lot of players who tried it out, and almost 50% of the rounds that were played during the test were on the PvE server. It created a moment.

“Some of the interesting takeaways are that some people who said, ‘Hey, I want PvE,’ changed their mind. They didn’t want it because it was lacking some of the values that the product had. And then you had players who absolutely loved it.

So the reality of the situation is clear: “Now it’s for us to figure out how we can cater to the specific needs of the players. But of course, not at the expense of the integrity of the experience itself, where you water it down and become a game of nothing.”