Yesterday we learned that ARC Raiders, the new F2P co-op shooter from ex-DICE-boss Patrick Söderlund’s new Embark Studios, has been delayed to 2023. The delay announcement was pretty boilerplate, but today, Söderlund provided some more details about Embark’s future plans. Surprisingly, the studio will actually be releasing a completely separate game, a team-based FPS codenamed Project Discovery, before ARC Raiders comes to market. Embark released a brief Project Discovery teaser late last year, which appeared to show a semi-cinematic, Battlefield-esque shooter with some melee combat. Check out the teaser for yourself, below.
Embark is celebrating 3 years! So what have we accomplished? We’ve grown to more than 250 game makers, we’ve got big plans for the future, and a few projects we are just itching to share. To celebrate, we thought we’d share a glimpse of *another* unannounced game in the works. 🎂 pic.twitter.com/TdeZQcuvDs
— Embark Studios (@EmbarkStudios) November 9, 2021
Here’s a bit more detail on the Project Discovery situation from Söderlund…
“As you may be aware, Embark has several projects in development. Beyond ARC Raiders, we’re also working on a team-based first-person shooter, codenamed Project Discovery. We’ve got a number of super talented people with ample fps experience here at Embark, and the development of Project Discovery has progressed faster than we first imagined, especially over the past few months.
So much so, that we started facing the prospect of being able to release two games simultaneously. For a young, relatively small studio like ours, releasing two games in short succession would have strained our teams and resources, many of which are shared between the two projects. As such, we decided to let Project Discovery be our studio’s first game to market, pushing ARC Raiders to a 2023 release. It’s a decision that will also allow us to expand and refine the ARC Raiders experience.”
Interestingly, it seems Embark is also working on a new PvP mode for ARC Raiders, which Söderlund implies will be a major focus for the dev team going forward. Could we see a bit of a shift in focus for ARC Raiders? From co-op to PvP? We shall see.
“The world of ARC Raiders is exceptionally compelling and lends to many ways to play. Over the course of this spring, we started to concept and prototype a PvP-focused game mode in the ARC Raiders universe that we’re eager to spend some more time on before the game’s release. This extra time will allow us to do just that.”
Platforms or a release window for Project Discovery have yet to be revealed, although Söderlund promises more info “very soon.” ARC Raiders is slated to hit PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5 in 2023.
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