Yesterday we announced that we’re delaying the release of ARC Raiders to next year, having previously said the game would be coming out in 2022. We understand if you’re disappointed you won’t be getting your hands on ARC Raiders this year, and for that, we apologize.

In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to shed some light on what led to this decision. In short, it boils down to sequencing.

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 shared a small tease with some early footage of the project late last year.

Embark Studios on Twitter: "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 / Twitter"

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.

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.

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.

As soon as we’re ready to test ARC Raiders with a more sizable number of players, we will be diving into more detail about the game, its promise, and its gorgeous (but lethal) world.

And without getting into spoiler territory, I wanted to give you a heads up that more news from Project Discovery is due very soon™, so stay tuned.

An update on our games was originally published in Embark Studios on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This has been a special year, to say the least.

As individuals and as a collective, the global pandemic has required us to adapt.

While it hasn’t always been easy, I’ve been so impressed to see our teams adjusting and keep having fun despite the circumstances. We’re continuing to work on the things we have set out to do, and the studio keeps growing (we’re now close to 200 people).

What’s more, the importance of games as a medium has never been more palpable. During these strange times, games have helped us retain some sense of normalcy — a way to enjoy ourselves, pass time, hang out with friends. As a group making games for a living, we consider ourselves lucky.

As we’re now continuing on our journey, it’s time for an update on where we are, what we’re working on, and where we’re heading.

Some of you have reached out to ask me about some job ads that we have posted, for game-makers with first-person-shooter experience. What’s that all about? So yes, we have begun the development of our second game, and yes, it’s a PVP shooter.

To be honest, I thought I was done with PVP-shooters having worked on them in one form or another for almost my entire career. But a while back, some of us here put together a small pitch that was too irresistible to ignore.

It’s a concept that leans heavily into team-based gameplay and puts dynamism, physicality, and destruction front and center. Some of the industry’s most experienced first-person-shooter developers are with us here at Embark, and if you think working with them on a new project sounds like fun, you should take a look at our open positions!

We’re also continuing work on our first game, the one we first mentioned to you back in February of 2019. This spring we moved into what’s referred to as production in game development speak. That means we’ve moved beyond prototyping, into a phase where all the things we create are done so with the game we intend to launch in mind.

Our ambition with this game is to combine new and old genres with groundbreaking technical innovation, into something unique and consequential. And now, coming to a point where all this work is starting to manifest itself as a real game, is really exciting.

The next step is to get our first taste of outside feedback. We’ve been doing in-studio testing of the game every day for well over a year. Over the past few months, we’ve also been working on our first so-called UXR-build — an early, unfinished build of the game that we’re putting in front of people outside the studio to gather feedback and insights.

Working on our first games as a new studio, we’re adamant about rethinking how we go about development.

Traditionally, the biggest chunk of time in game development is centered around simply producing and polishing game assets. For large AAA games, this is painstakingly tedious, involving a lot of manual and boring work, and a big reason why burnout and crunch is such a prevalent problem for the industry — especially nowadays when games are live and always updated.

To solve this in the long term, we need to become smarter about the way we build games.

Right now, there’s a combination of technical breakthroughs happening in tandem, in fields like proceduralism and reinforcement learning, that will lead to a big shift in how we’re able to create and scale game content.

Our ambition as a studio is to make use of these breakthroughs and remove as many of the tedious, manual tasks from our own workflows as possible. In certain areas, like hard-surface modeling or character creation, our artists are now able to create content in days, where it used to take weeks, by applying procedural tools.

We want to show you all what this looks like in practice, in everything from environment art to animation. So stay tuned for more on this in the weeks to come, kicking off with an upcoming post on our approach to content creation from my colleague and Embark co-founder Rob Runesson.

Lastly, let’s briefly touch upon the work we’re doing with our game creation platform. It’s the project that I probably get the most questions about, and one we frankly haven’t talked extensively about yet.

Over the past years, we’ve seen the emergence of experiences that start to blur the boundaries between making and playing. I’m thinking of game creation platforms like Dreams or Roblox, or sandbox games like Minecraft. We’re seeing elements of this appearing in established franchises too, like Fortnite with its Creative sandbox, and in indie-games like Baba is You.

It’s really encouraging to see all these developments. It’s obvious when you think about it, that allowing anyone to create sharable interactive experiences, that are played with others, is the next big frontier for games. But we think there’s much more to do in this space than making the editors we know and recognize more simple to use.

So since the day this studio was founded, we’ve been attempting to re-think how games are created, so that anyone can do it. We’re exploring ways for players to be in worlds, and play with them— ways for players to effortlessly and intuitively change rules, creatures, and possibilities.

Obviously, building an experience that enables this is a big endeavor. A lot of our work so far has been focused on laying the groundwork for our engine and platform. If you’ve followed our progress, you might have seen that we’re open-sourcing some of our work to add capabilities to the Rust ecosystem, on which we’re basing this platform (starting with things like physics, dependency management, and shaders).

Next year we plan to release a preview of our work so far — to gather feedback, and to further our work with the community. If you want to chat with Embark devs, open-source contributors, and other gamedev or tech enthusiasts about all of this, head over to our Discord.

Finally, a shoutout to our team. Embark consists of the most talented group of people I have ever worked with. I’m awestruck, every single day, at the things I see from them, and I can’t overstate what a special place this studio has become.

Our continued journey was originally published in Embark Studios on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s start with the news of the day. In case you missed it, Nexon just announced they will increase their ownership in Embark to become a majority owner of the studio. You can read more about the details here.

Nexon has been with us from the beginning, as our first and only investor and the publisher of our first game. Frankly, we wouldn’t be where we are without them. The team at Nexon has seen what we’ve managed to achieve over these past seven months, and believe in our studio and what we’re attempting to do.

I joined Nexon’s board earlier this year, and I’ve been really impressed with their patient attitude to game development. They know how to make games that engage players for decades. Most importantly, our companies share the same world-view. We both know that game development needs an overhaul, and we’re both convinced that new technology, methodologies, and perspectives will completely reshape what games can become.

So what now? We keep on building our studio and will continue doing things the way we have, working on the things we’ve started building. If anything, Nexon’s increased support means we can move a bit faster and focus even harder on our long-term mission.

Speaking of what we’re working on, I thought it would be interesting to detail some of our latest progress.

Last time I wrote one of these we were just off the starting blocks, with a team of some 50 employees. The studio continues to grow, and we’re now approaching 80 (really talented) people, a team small enough to fit on a photo if we cram together.

Around half of the studio is working on our first game which, if you recall, is a cooperative free-to-play action game set in a distant future, about overcoming seemingly impossible odds by working together.

The game team has been deep into prototyping over the spring, and we’re beginning to see the early seeds of something unique. The other week we started running weekly (and gloriously buggy) playtests, which means we have begun iterating on our ideas and can start to identify the things that are good and the things that are less good.

Our artists (who recently came back from a photogrammetry trip to Iceland) have set out to create large worlds at high visual fidelity, while remaining a small and focused team.

Their work is a good example of how we’re approaching game development in a drastically new way. They combine photogrammetry with procedural workflows and have a mindset to avoid manual input to the largest extent possible. The results are promising, as seen by this environment test in Unreal that we shared the other month.

But we’re working on more than games. Around a quarter of the studio is focused on our long-term mission. As some of you may have heard us say, we think it’s too hard for people that aren’t professional game developers to make games.

So we’ve started working on a platform that we hope will let anyone create interactive experiences, even people with no prior experience with game development tools.

Much of the work on the platform so far has gone into building up the core, and there are some large and interesting challenges ahead.

Animation and movement, for instance, is one of these walled-off areas in game development that until now has required the expertise and resources of a game studio to pull off. So we’re asking ourselves, can we develop a method that would enable anyone to animate?

Our AI team is experimenting with a physically-based system that uses reinforcement learning to create animations. Here’s an example of some walking animations for a spider-robot, created by our learning system without any manual animation work at all.

The team and I can’t wait to share more about the things we’re up to. I know that our CTO and my co-founder Johan Andersson (aka repi) is itching to tell you more about our vision for our platform, and how we work with Rust. So keep following us on whatever channel you prefer (GitHub, Twitter, Instagram, or here on Medium) for more updates.

Considering all that has happened, it’s hard for me to fathom that we started this studio from scratch a short seven months ago. There’s plenty of stuff we need to accomplish, but so far it feels like we’ve hit the ground running.

And finally, if you think Embark sounds like a place for you, don’t hesitate to check out our career page or send us an open application.

Some news from Embark was originally published in Embark Studios on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some three months have passed since we started Embark, and things around here are taking form.

We’ve read through thousands of applications, hired over 50 people, moved into our own house in the heart of Stockholm’s Old Town, and begun building what looks to become our first game.

So I thought now’s as good a time as any to share an update on why we started this venture. I want to let you in on some decisions we’ve made, and give you a glimpse into our progress so far.

In the first few weeks, the six of us who founded the studio huddled together in a tiny room we had managed to borrow, and worked on the stuff that any new company has to deal with: hiring people, finding an office, setting up a basic website, and getting our paperwork in order.

But in a shorter time than I would have expected, the early team here settled around an idea for our first proper game — an idea that we were immediately excited about, that resonates with our mission, and that we have now begun prototyping.

Lots about this first game of ours will change and evolve as we progress. With that caveat out of the way, I can tell you that it’s a cooperative free-to-play action game set in a distant future, about overcoming seemingly impossible odds by working together.

After testing and trying different alternatives, we have decided to develop this game in Epic’s Unreal Engine, augmented with some of our own new technology. Our team is now having lots of fun getting to know the engine, and are making good headway.

For instance, here’s a terrain test that our art team has been working on, showcasing just how powerful Unreal can be.

Our goal with this terrain test was to see how far we could push visual fidelity on a large scale (256 square kilometers), with completely dynamic weather & lighting, and without having to be a huge team.

Everything in this clip was created by three people over three weeks, using real-world scanned data, procedurally placed objects, and some great tools.

Many of us here have experience from working at larger studios, with lots of support and resources. The reality of running a smaller studio means we need to work differently; we have to keep learning and come up with efficient workflows, and we always need to challenge our assumptions.

“a game set in a distant future, about overcoming seemingly impossible odds by working together”

Beyond getting started with our first game, we have one large overarching ambition; in essence, we think it’s too hard for people that aren’t professional game developers to create games, and we want to blur the line between playing and making, with games and tools that empower anyone to create.

Just like anyone today can produce their own videos, write their own blogs, or make their own music, we imagine a world where everyone is able to create and share meaningful interactive experiences. Our belief is that the more people that are empowered to create, the better, more interesting and more diverse games will become.

This is a big vision, and we’re realistic about the challenge. It will take time and effort to get there. And for a small studio like ours, the right way to tackle this won’t be to hide away for years, trying to develop something big and complex that may or may not succeed.

Instead, we’re focused on getting something out there quite fast that we can build upon — a really fun game that, if popular, can expand with design and functionality that take us closer to our long-term vision.

In the coming months, we’re going share more with you about our journey, the challenges we face, the problems we (hopefully) solve, and the things we learn along the way.

And in time, if all goes well, you’ll get a proper game reveal too.

Meanwhile, if you think what we’re doing sounds interesting, follow us on Twitter, Instagram and here on Medium to keep updated.

And if you think you would make a good addition to our team — or know anyone that might — check out our open positions.

An update from Embark Studios was originally published in Embark Studios on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.