ARC Raiders’ Stella Montis is a punishing PVP battleground thanks to Embark ignoring a “precise formula” for making new maps

It hasn’t taken long for the ARC Raiders community to unlock Stella Montis, a brand-new locale for scavenging, alliances, and betrayals. The latest map in Embark Studios’ extraction shooter relies on claustrophobic interiors for tight PvP firefights, while cavernous industrial areas envelop you in darkness. It’s a sharp shift in direction from the Blue Gate, that’s for sure. Before the game’s release, design director Virgil Watkins tells me about creating maps with a constant sense of threat.

In the build-up to ARC Raiders, I sat down with Watkins to discuss Embark’s second title. Our chat takes us from potentially giving Speranza a Destiny 2-style hub to explore, crafting the magic of proximity chat, to underrated features. As someone who had already amassed over 25 hours in-game between Tech Tech 2 and the Server Slam before launch, I needed to know what makes each map tick. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in the sandy hills of Buried City or the plains of Spaceport; every map pushes a looming danger – even when you can’t see it.

When asked about the challenge to meet that atmosphere, Watkins kicks off the topic by expressing that “we have a pretty consistent rule set when it comes to developing our areas, developing our loot locations, developing where we place groups of enemies, and what those enemy groups consist of.” There’s a flow to ARC Raiders, one you can quickly become accustomed to.

The muscle memory of associating certain pieces of gear with POIs is one thing, but anticipating what ARC enemies are spawning into the fight is another. Could a Bastion be waiting in that large open space behind Buried City’s apartments? Maybe, but it isn’t an exact science. “I wouldn’t say we have a precise formula for how it is, but, you know, we do a lot of testing internally as we build these maps and just sort of kind of, you know, see what feels right for a given area,” Watkins continues. It may be surprising to hear there isn’t an exact method for the sauce of ARC Raiders’ maps.

Especially considering that many people have discussed Embark’s in-house machine learning tools, a high point of contention surrounding the game’s success. For context, Embark is combining traditional, hand-made animation with machine-trained results that move and react on their own. Instead of relying on preset clips, these tools use reinforcement learning to climb terrain, recover from hits, and adapt to whatever happens in the world.

Even with this tech, the studio maintains that human input stays vital. Animators shape the style and intent of each movement, designers define behaviors and goals, and engineers handle the physics and tools that make everything work in Unreal Engine. But it can’t happen without collaboration. Watkins gestures toward other departments of Embark, enthusiastically digging into two elements the studio is known for striving in already with The Finals: sound and vision.

“I think things like our audio and the aesthetic play into this so much, because we can utilize the way the light is in a given level. We can utilize how audible certain things are between floors of a building, or from this building to the next building, or from this building across the city,” he comments. ARC Raiders’ fusion of retro-futuristic art direction and hard-hitting sound design is a winning formula. The punch of a Ferro rifle is mighty, while the dispersion of a Kettle magazine is oddly satisfying.

Watkins adds, “You might be hiding in the corner somewhere, and you can hear someone breaching a door, or hear a Probe outside, or hear the Rocketeer blowing up a squad half a kilometer away. And I think all of that is what makes you feel constantly like things are happening around me, and I need to keep being aware of it, rather than feeling like you’re just kind of isolated.”

For more on Embark’s latest game, you can read my ARC Raiders review.