A blog post by Patrick Söderlund follows up on yesterday's news of a delay to ARC Raiders. The former DICE boss explains that the co-op shooter is taking a back seat to Project Discovery, a team-based first-person shooter that was teased last year. Project Discovery doesn't have a release date, but Patrick promises "more news from Project Discovery is due very soon™." The post confirms that ARC Raiders is now expected in calendar 2023. Word is: "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." Word is Project Discovery came together more quickly than anticipated, and releasing two games in rapid succession would overtax the fledgling studio:

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.

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.