ARC Raiders is one of the biggest successes in the video game industry lately, and the game’s story is one that keeps getting better the more we hear about it. Former EA and DICE developers coming together to make the games they wanted to make, taking their time to build ARC Raiders, having the wherewithal to give it time to be worked (and reworked) while still getting another project over the line, before it was ready for prime time this past October.
After learning hours ago that Embark almost went back on its initial pivot from PvE to PvPvE back to PvE during ARC Raiders playtesting, an interview with GamesIndustry.Biz, studio founder and chief executive officer Patrick Söderlund (who was also recently named an executive chairmen for at publisher Nexon) provides a little more insight into how Embark Studios got to the point where it had one of the best-selling games in 2025.
And how the studio did it with a fraction of the cost compared to other major AAA games operating on the same scale in terms of player base and copies sold, with much bigger development teams. “It has nothing to do with how many you are. That’s not the point. Our ambition is to be able to produce quality and depth in our products that’s similar to what other teams and studios can do, but obviously with a lot fewer people.”
“We’ve been a part of it since early on, when sever or ten people could make a game,” said Söderlund. “We were part of this spiralling exercise of people, cost and time. Now, with the available tools, pipelines, and technology, as well as a different way of building and structuring ourselves, we hypothesized that we could do this faster and better than in our previous lives. We quickly realized we could; we can do a lot better. We can compete in the AAA space, and we can do that with maybe a quarter of the budget.“
Söderlund isn’t talking about GenAI tech when mentioning the available tools today, at least not entirely. It’s well known that Embark has been using GenAI tech, most controversially with its NPCs, in both ARC Raiders and The Finals, but Söderlund is clear to say that GenAI plays a small role in the studios work.
“We asked what other means of technology are available to us. Could we use the topography from Google Maps? We use photogrammetry, taking photos of objects to texture assets. Can we do a realistic landscape using procedural generation and pipelines?,” Söderlund said. What it actually is, according to Söderlund, is “old ways of working.”
“Very little of it is AI. A lot of it is reconfiguring what I believe are old ways of working – old toolsets, old pipelines, old engines, and saying there must be a better way of doing this.”
Söderlund also directly commented on how the studio uses GenAI for voice work. “We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game. For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren’t as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio.“
Söderlund also added that Embark has since gone back and even re-recorded some of the lines that were done with GenAI with actors, and now uses those recordings instead. He also admitted “there is a quality difference.”
“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices. There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It’s also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don’t necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”
For more on ARC Raiders, check out our hub page with all of our coverage, and for help on all your runs Topside, check out our complete walkthrough and guides hub.
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