Embark Studios build the award-winning ARC Raiders with Unreal Engine
Embark Studios is a Stockholm-based game studio founded in 2018. Driven by deep curiosity and an underdog's mindset, Embark challenges the conventions of game development. With a team of over 300 game makers, the studio pairs technical ambition with a relentless pursuit of new ideas to deliver surprising, genre-defying experiences. Embark released THE FINALS in 2023 and ARC Raiders in 2025.
ARC Raiders is a critically acclaimed extraction shooter that won Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards 2025.
Within the first two weeks of launch, the game consistently broke its own records, exceeding 462,000 concurrent players, selling over four million copies, and becoming the number one global seller on Steam. Since then, the extraction shooter has sold over 14 million copies worldwide with a peak of 960,000 concurrent players.
Developed by Embark Studios, the game sees you deploy into a map full of other players to shoot and loot as much as you can before making an escape.
Within the first two weeks of launch, the game consistently broke its own records, exceeding 462,000 concurrent players, selling over four million copies, and becoming the number one global seller on Steam. Since then, the extraction shooter has sold over 14 million copies worldwide with a peak of 960,000 concurrent players.
Developed by Embark Studios, the game sees you deploy into a map full of other players to shoot and loot as much as you can before making an escape.
As a raider in post-apocalyptic Italy, you shelter underground but regularly emerge to scavenge resources. That task is made a lot more difficult by other raiders fighting for the same spoils as you—and by hostile autonomous robots that infest the scarred landscape.
Embark Studios leveraged Unreal Engine to craft the game’s expansive open world and optimize the gameplay, while Epic Online Services’ voice chat and anti-cheat features provided critical backend services that were crucial to the experience.
Embark Studios leveraged Unreal Engine to craft the game’s expansive open world and optimize the gameplay, while Epic Online Services’ voice chat and anti-cheat features provided critical backend services that were crucial to the experience.
Hard decisions that paid off
ARC Raiders has smashed records, but it could have ended up a very different game.
Back in 2021, Embark Studios had envisioned the extraction shooter as a co-op only experience.
Internal playtesting and feedback from early technical tests encouraged them to go down a new path however, adding a PvP component that resulted in the unpredictable action that has garnered so many plaudits for the title.
“This fundamentally changed some of the core mechanics and required additional development time to implement and refine,” explains Aleksander Grøndal, Executive Producer at Embark Studios.
The result was a richer, more dynamic extraction shooter experience.
“We’re really happy with how that decision has made for a better game, and allowed us to better realize the full potential of this world,” says Grøndal.
The world in question can be broadly divided into two parts. Speranza is the oldest underground neighborhood within the subterranean city of Toledo—the main player hub where raiders prepare for missions, manage gear, and rest between treacherous expeditions to the surface.
Then there’s the post-apocalyptic, ruined surface of Earth—known as the Rust Belt—where players scavenge: a desolate, dangerous landscape teeming with hostile machine enemies.
ARC RAIDERS © 2025 Embark Studios AB
To bring this world to life, Embark Studios needed an engine that could both hit AAA-quality and provide tools that the team could get up and running with fast.
“Unreal Engine gave us a good foundation to get started quickly with many excellent editor tools,” says Jonas Kjellström, CTO at Embark Studios.
Because the world was so expansive, the team leaned heavily into Unreal Engine’s worldbuilding toolkit.
“UE5 features like Runtime Virtual Texturing and World Partition are key for us to bring worlds of this scale to the player in a performant and developer-friendly way,” explains Mikael Linderholm, Technical Art Director at Embark Studios.
“Unreal Engine gave us a good foundation to get started quickly with many excellent editor tools,” says Jonas Kjellström, CTO at Embark Studios.
Because the world was so expansive, the team leaned heavily into Unreal Engine’s worldbuilding toolkit.
“UE5 features like Runtime Virtual Texturing and World Partition are key for us to bring worlds of this scale to the player in a performant and developer-friendly way,” explains Mikael Linderholm, Technical Art Director at Embark Studios.
ARC RAIDERS © 2025 Embark Studios AB
Runtime Virtual Texturing (RVT) is a performance-saving technique that acts like a real-time painter, blending 3D objects—like rocks or buildings—into the ground landscape so they look like they naturally belong there.
World Partition is a system that enables you to build a massive, seamless game world in one go. The engine automatically breaks the world into smaller 2D grid squares to keep performance fast, and when your character walks around, the game only loads the grid squares immediately around you. As you walk forward, it loads new squares and unloads the ones far behind you.
Effectively, that means you don't have to break your world into small, separate sub-levels anymore—you work on one giant map, and Unreal Engine handles the rest.
“The improvements over previous methods to create, stream and render large terrain heavy worlds have been critical for our success,” says Linderholm.
As with any PvP shooter, much of your focus in ARC Raiders is spent fending off (or attacking) your fellow humans.
However, where the game differs from other titles in the genre is its incredibly strong and varied roster of robotic NPC enemies—the ARC.
These ARC have been designed to feel heavy, industrial, and compellingly believable.
The team used a combination of the physics system, reinforced locomotion learning, and procedural animation in Unreal Engine to create these interesting, interactive enemies.
World Partition is a system that enables you to build a massive, seamless game world in one go. The engine automatically breaks the world into smaller 2D grid squares to keep performance fast, and when your character walks around, the game only loads the grid squares immediately around you. As you walk forward, it loads new squares and unloads the ones far behind you.
Effectively, that means you don't have to break your world into small, separate sub-levels anymore—you work on one giant map, and Unreal Engine handles the rest.
“The improvements over previous methods to create, stream and render large terrain heavy worlds have been critical for our success,” says Linderholm.
As with any PvP shooter, much of your focus in ARC Raiders is spent fending off (or attacking) your fellow humans.
However, where the game differs from other titles in the genre is its incredibly strong and varied roster of robotic NPC enemies—the ARC.
These ARC have been designed to feel heavy, industrial, and compellingly believable.
The team used a combination of the physics system, reinforced locomotion learning, and procedural animation in Unreal Engine to create these interesting, interactive enemies.
ARC RAIDERS © 2025 Embark Studios AB
Immersive, dread-inducing audio
The soundscape in ARC Raiders is little short of phenomenal.
From pattering rain and chirping birds to distant gunfire and muffled explosions, the ambient noise in the game is designed to maximize immersion and atmospheric tension.
“The guiding principle for the sound of ARC Raiders has been to make the unbelievable feel believable,” explains Bence Pajor, Audio Director at Embark Studios. “We’ve strived to create a realistic foundation that takes cues from reality to make the world of ARC Raiders intuitively understandable and immersive.”
ARC Raiders relies heavily on field recordings treated in a naturalistic way to create a dynamic and cohesive soundscape, where the sum is more than the parts.
Spatialization and acoustic simulations are employed not only to enhance the sense of being present in the world, but also to help players understand it and intuit distance, space, environment, threats, and other gameplay cues from sound—rather than relying on UI elements and other meta layers.
“We ask players to pay attention, lean in, and listen carefully to the world around them, and we reward them for it,” says Pajor.
Along with the audio design, the game has been celebrated for its fluid gameplay and optimization. The team leveraged the profiling tools in Unreal Engine to help keep performance budgets in check.
“We use Unreal Insights extensively for profiling the game and finding bottlenecks,” confirms Kjellström.
ARC RAIDERS © 2025 Embark Studios AB
Epic Online Services for backend services
Embark did not only use Unreal Engine on ARC Raiders—the team also relied upon other parts of the Epic ecosystem.
When it comes to backend services and the ongoing management of running the game, Epic Online Services has proven to be invaluable.
“We’ve been using Easy Anti-Cheat as a base layer for our anti-cheat efforts,” says Kjellström.
“On top of that, we have multiple additional layers which give us better insight into player behavior and patterns that we use to build rules and tools for detection.”
Easy Anti Cheat is an industry-leading service that uses a prevention-first approach to help developers stop common exploits early and detect sophisticated threats in multiplayer PC games by deploying game-specific and behavioral detections, enabling integrated enforcement such as player sanctions and hardware bans, and more.
ARC RAIDERS © 2025 Embark Studios AB
The team also makes use of Epic Online Service's Voice feature to enable players to talk to other teams while in close proximity. Using voice chat, you can band together to find loot and kill bigger ARCs than you otherwise could—or just strike up a conversation with your fellow players.
“On top of that, we have our custom voice-changer technology for creating the immersive Raider Voice,” explains Kjellström.
Raider Voice is an in-game audio setting in ARC Raiders that acts as a real-time voice changer, enabling players to alter their voice to sound different to others.
The inspiration came from the idea of creating a safe space where players could use their voice to interact with other players in interesting ways.
“On top of that, we have our custom voice-changer technology for creating the immersive Raider Voice,” explains Kjellström.
Raider Voice is an in-game audio setting in ARC Raiders that acts as a real-time voice changer, enabling players to alter their voice to sound different to others.
The inspiration came from the idea of creating a safe space where players could use their voice to interact with other players in interesting ways.
ARC RAIDERS © 2025 Embark Studios AB
Creative vision meets innovative technology
ARC Raiders is a testament to what can happen when a clear creative vision is matched with the right technology and the courage to evolve.
From a pivotal shift in design direction to the meticulous crafting of expansive worlds, immersive soundscapes, and intelligent enemy systems, Embark Studios embraced bold decisions in service of a better player experience.
The result is an extraction shooter that feels alive and deeply immersive—one that invites players not just to compete, but to inhabit the world of the game.
To learn more about what’s coming next in ARC Raiders, follow Embark Studios on social media and keep an eye on their website: