I have a lot of fond memories about Arc Raiders' release. The world was beautiful, terrifying, and expansive. It provided some of the best community interactions I've had in a game to date, and it was just a refreshingly good time to share with friends. But that didn't last as long as I and many others would have hoped, with executive producer Aleksander Grøndal admitting that Embark overestimated its capacity for work.

"Transitioning to live service is going to be fucking hard. Everyone said that to me. I've even said that to other people. I was mentally prepared for it to be hard—but I wasn't completely prepared for how hard it was," Grøndal says in an interview with Game Developer. "When you build a game up until launch, you build and you test and you build and you test and you fix things and measure results. So the way that we've been building video games was based on that idea—but now the demands of the players are really high, we feel like we really can't go much faster."

Arc Raiders is sadly a very good example of suffering from success. Sure, the devs had an inkling of how big this game could get, but I don't think anyone could've predicted the heights Arc Raiders would reach. Embark also made no secret of the fact that it simply wasn't as big or well-equipped as other live-service competitors like Activision Blizzard or Riot, but the team still tried to keep up the pace that was expected of them.

This is a recipe for disaster, with Grøndal explaining how "the team [was] super tired" but that they still tried to put "out content as fast as we can but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well." Trying to keep pace with players that were completing events, sussing out arcs, and exploring maps faster than Embark could add them led to a very long and very stale period, which then saw a huge drop-off in players.

"I'm proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year," Grøndal adds. "But at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that. We didn't have the time. You also have a lot of the cost of just maintaining the game—implementing bug fixes, exploits, and other constraints. We were constantly overshooting our capacity and so it was hard to plan when there's so much to do. There's a lot of maintenance and cleanup [that takes up so much of your time]."

It didn't just have a negative impact on the game, as the devs also began to feel the pains of overextending. "The team were super unhappy. To be fair, they were running really hard milestones and that wasn't fun and challenging, so we had to do something. The players were also complaining and I don't think the consistency was high enough."

The cycle only stopped when the team asked themselves "why are we doing this?" and re-evaluated their long-term plan for Arc Raiders. "Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths [...] and what we produce will be better, more interesting, and higher-quality across the board. It also gives us time to work things out instead of just shipping, shipping, shipping. We can actually iterate."

Grøndal also stresses that they needed to put an end to the ongoing burnout. "It's super important [to protect people]," he says. "I can tell you a personal story. I was burned out. We'd just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken. We talk about burnout and it's obviously bad, but being burned out feels super shitty to be honest. It's terrible. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also, it means we lose good people who might be out [of work] for a very long time."

There's always going to be more to do in a live service game like Arc Raiders. And while there are some very serious reworks needed and problems to address—like its anticheat—I'd never want anyone to prioritise content over their health. It's just a game, after all, and more often than not well-rested and happy people create better things. It may take longer to get new content, but a more relaxed and committed approach to Arc Raiders will make for a better game in the longrun—we're already seeing the fruits of that tack with Frozen Trail.

"It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance," Grøndal adds. "If we think long-term about this product—not just in small increments but big-picture stuff—we need all of these great people. Those are the people who built Arc Raiders in the first place." I couldn't agree more.

Even though it's still in closed beta, Deadlock, the newest shooter from Valve, is still setting records. The shooter just surpassed 228,000 concurrent players, on the back of a massive update focusing on various gameplay elements.

Right off the top, this round of additions, collectively known as City Never Sleeps, brings in no less than six new characters to play as. Among them are Rat King, who's described as "Scrappy, regal, tenacious"; explosives expert Deadman Danny; and my personal favorite, the tea-drinking Baba.

The half-dozen each bring different strategies to the table, which you can use on the rejigged map. There's one central location in Deadlock, a version of New York City, and it's been retooled here to be full of creepy crawlies and other terrors. Just in time for Halloween - I approve.

Meanwhile, there are more objectives now, voting is better, a greater selection of items, and a wealth of other options across various facets of the mysterious, multiplayer release. There's a lot going on here, and the devs addressed the community on their mindset going into this patch.

"After the Old Gods New Blood update, we felt that there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development (like updating older hero artwork)," the team says. "Unlike previous updates where our efforts were more singularly focused on the key parts of that update, this year we've been working on several different things in parallel."

Many of those "several different things are addressed in City Never Sleeps. It's noted that Midboss, Guardians and Walkers are due for changes that just haven't happened yet. "On the other hand, things like hero remodels were in our heads as something we'd get to later, towards the end of early development, after other core aspects of the game were more fleshed out," Valve writes. "That doesn't mean we don't think they are important by any means, just that they are more of a known quantity to us that don't necessarily need to be done earlier than other things."

What the studio is doing is definitely working. Deadlock remains invite-only at present, but if you can get in, it seems worth a look.

Another Steam page is being turned into an algorithm as Valve aims to show "10x more games to customers"