Disastrous Marathon Beta Test Was ‘A Very Good A/B Test’ for Arc Raiders, Says CTO

Arc Raiders technical director Virgil Watkins said that Arc Raiders’ April playtest coinciding with Marathon’s previous closed beta was a coincidence, but was “a really good A/B test” for Embark Studios’ own extraction shooter.

Arc Raiders, which recently had its final open beta – server slam – ahead of its October 30 launch, has been in development for quite a while. The game has generated a lot of hype during this period, but it has certainly generated renewed enthusiasm, in part because of how close the previous beta was to Marathon’s first broadcast. Players could compare and contrast the two games and found Marathon lacking.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Watkins explained his perspective on this moment and what it meant for the team at Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios.

Watkins said, “It was a complete coincidence that they had their test around the time we did it. To my knowledge, I don’t think any of us knew this was going to happen. It was a really good A/B test for us, because obviously they made decisions that we didn’t make, and vice versa. So we were able to kind of compare and contrast how some of these things played out.”

Fast forward to last weekend, and these two games that were once rivals couldn’t be further apart in terms of public opinion. The aforementioned Arc Raiders server slam managed to reach almost 100,000 concurrent players during its opening hours on PC only, furthering the positive sentiment around the title.

Marathon, on the other hand, remains in limbo. After its first public test, players were torn over some of the design decisions made for the game, with the lack of solo queue or proximity chat being particularly jarring absences. Following this, Marathon was at the center of a plagiarism scandal, with many of its visual elements apparently based on the work of outside artists.

The game was then delayed from its initial September release, but will soon be playable again as part of a new open beta test, which will run from October 22-27. This will be the next big chance for Marathons to regain interest after a particularly shaky start.

This will also end when Arc Raiders releases, in what appears to be a continuous dance between the two extraction shooters. Will Arc Raiders suck all the oxygen out of the genre? Or can Marathon reclaim some goodwill? Everything could be decided this month.