Some members of the ARC Raiders team would love to do things like offering players the chance to recreate the tripping mechanic used in The Empire Strikes Back, but the game’s lead designers have some compelling reasons why the physics team shouldn’t pursue that at the moment.
ARC Raiders Team Has Imagined Improved Rope Physics For Tripping
During a recent chat with Games Radar at GDC, ARC Raiders machine learning research lead Martin Singh-Blom speculated about new and different systems that could be used in ARC Raiders to take down larger enemies using some new technological developments. As one example, Singh-Blom cited the iconic Star Wars battle on Hoth.
“I think we all have different ideas… Those of us who really work with the physics and make things happen with physics of course want more physics in the game at every turn. We want ropes to pull at legs and wires to trip them, like the Hoth invasion scene in Star Wars where they have the speeders and wrap up the legs. We could do that if we just had better rope physics, right?”
That obviously sounds very cool and like an amazing tool for ARC Raiders players to play around with, but Singh-Blom quickly explained that the game’s lead designers are much more in tune with what players need in the immediate future and which features fit best with the game’s overall design.
“Those kinds of things, we keep pushing for and then the designers are like, ‘Well, it doesn’t fit in our game right now. This is not the vision for this part, or we just don’t have the resources to deal with this kind of stuff right now.’ They tend to be much more hooked into what the game actually needs, and we tend to be much more hooked into what we want to do with this new tech. Hopefully we get a good synthesis where we push the boundaries of what we can do, and still do things that make sense for the game.”
It’s very interesting to see a small glimpse into the minds of the research team at Embark Studios and how their thinking and experimentation has to come together with the rest of the development and design team to ultimately fit in with the larger piece of art and the available resources that the project can offer.
ARC Raiders is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles.
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