Huh, Arc Raiders' maps are heavily based on real-world locations: 'Spaceport was actually done in Tenerife'

Arc Raiders is one of the most exciting surprises of 2025: the chilled-out extraction shooter that somehow managed to get everything right. Embark Studios now has the considerable job of building out the game's world and delivering the kind of ongoing content that keeps players interested, but so far it's managed the task well, and not a little of that is down to the game launching with four beautifully realised and huge maps (swiftly bolstered by the addition of a fifth, Stella Montis).

In a new interview with Games Beat, Embark's CEO Patrick Söderlund went into some detail on how the studio built the game's maps, and the big surprise for me was how closely they hew to certain real world inspirations.

"[Dam Battlegrounds] is the second one we made," says Söderlund. "To get the first iteration done probably takes weeks before it's playable but ugly and then it takes… I think we probably spent 6 months on this map to playtest it and make it playable."

"The real work is actually making sure the map plays well. Testing everything, where to put things where they spawn, to get—artistically—to get the map in a reasonable shape is actually quite quick."

The game where you see this in real-time, although it's a very different beast to Arc Raiders, is Counter-Strike 2. There's a core map pool of course, but Valve is constantly pushing new community maps, incentivising players to use them with XP rewards, and then making small and large tweaks over time. You see every CS2 map go through this, and the results speak for themselves: over 30 million players a month. But let's get back to Arc:

"The design of the map takes a little while, it's a very iterative phase, going back and forth [to] test, see where you place enemies," says Söderlund. "Because the maps are relatively complex with vast outdoor environments, but there are also indoor environments. The levels are very big and you have to make sure that there's something distinct and also interesting to entice people to play."

Any Arc player would surely agree that this is one of Arc Raiders' big achievements: you're never far from a point of interest, and the game does a great job of dropping things into the environment throughout a round. It's a world that's so easy to get distracted in, because it's packed with interesting things.

Finally, Söderlund gets to the real world inspirations.

"All maps are based on real-world, satellite topography data using Google Maps, and then they're taken from places that exist in the world," says Söderlund. "So we go to a location, find an area that we like: Spaceport was actually done in Tenerife.

"We went there and saw what it looks like there, took a ton of pictures of rocks and formations, and then we used Google Maps to get topography right and then on top of that we used scanned data, and then you basically make the map using non-traditional means such as photos, which is kind of fun."

Well, I wasn't expecting the "Spaceport is Tenerife" line, but maybe I'll head there tonight and treat myself to a daiquiri.

Elsewhere in the same interview, Söderlund is also finally explicit about the game's "aggression-based" matchmaking, which the community has been speculating around since launch: "If your preference is to do PvE and have less conflict with players," Söderlund says. "you're more likely to get matched with similar players."