Overview
- Embark described early development as directionless, with teams waging daily “playtest battles” over competing visions from battle royale to co-op boss rush.
- After external tests found the game wasn’t consistently fun, the team shrank from roughly 120 to 25 as part of a reset that Nexon approved for another try.
- The pivot leveraged PvP expertise to make a PvPvE extraction shooter, slowing overall movement by about 60% and removing high‑mobility features like jump pads.
- Initial post‑pivot tests showed strong negative sentiment toward PvP, which the team traced to weapon balance, feedback, looting, and solo‑versus‑squad matchmaking, then iterated to improve.
- Following launch success—Nexon reported 14 million copies in three months—Embark has been replacing many AI text‑to‑speech lines with recorded actors and says AI remains a production tool, with actors paid for sessions and select TTS licensing.