Agenda

What do you do when your AAA game technically works, looks great and still isn’t fun? In this session, we share how ARC Raiders reached that moment, how we proved it to ourselves, and how we rebuilt the game without losing the team’s confidence or momentum. Through structured internal playtests, friends-and-family sessions, and survey-driven analysis, we moved past anecdotal feedback and clearly defined why the game wasn’t working, not just that it wasn’t.

We’ll walk through the decision to reset the project: what we kept, what we threw away, and how we gave the team renewed direction without falling back on heavy design documentation. Instead, we focused on clear design intent, strong pillars, and team autonomy allowing designers, engineers, and artists to solve problems rather than execute prescribed solutions.

The talk breaks down the iterative process that turned the game around: defining player cohorts and target audiences, running public tests, structuring feedback into actionable problem buckets, and repeatedly asking one critical question - which problem does this change actually solve? Finally, we’ll discuss how clarity of intent and trust in the team created a culture that consistently produced better solutions, and ultimately created a successful game!