Arc Raiders production director Caio Braga said vehicles are "not off the table" for the extraction shooter, but they are not actively in development, according to comments made at the Game Developers Conference 2026 this month.
The comments reveal a tension in modern game development: the existence of abandoned work and the difficulty of repurposing it. Braga confirmed the team previously experimented with vehicles that ultimately did not make the cut in Arc Raiders, specifically noting that "We have prototypes for vehicles from seven years ago that have not been touched in a while."
Embark's hesitation reflects a broader design philosophy. For a successful extraction shooter that the studio plans to support for a long time, Braga said "it is quite open" and noted the team "talked about [supporting Arc Raiders for] 10 years" and wants "this game to last for a long time," though "everything is a bit open as long as it fits our lore and the kind of experience we want to give."
The calculus matters for a game that launched just months ago. Arc Raiders had sold 14 million copies worldwide by February 2026, making it one of the year's surprise commercial successes. The extraction shooter won Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards 2025. That momentum creates pressure to sustain engagement, yet Embark appears wary of feature creep that could undermine the deliberately paced, tension-driven experience the studio spent years perfecting.
Vehicles could help Arc Raiders stand out, as the extraction game is historically a boots-on-the-ground affair, and vehicles in general have fallen out of favour in multiplayer shooters, with Battlefield 6 and a few battle royales still featuring them. Yet introducing mobility mechanics to a game built on sound discipline, resource scarcity, and deliberate movement carries obvious risks. The prototypes remain gathering dust, a reminder that not all promising ideas survive the transition from concept to finished product.