Arc Raiders Production Director Caio Braga spoke with GamesRadar+ at the GDC conference and talked about how the final version of the reload mechanic came about.
There were disputes in the Arc Raiders team during the development process. Some wanted to make the mechanics immersive — to abandon automatic reloading.
Other developers involved in the game's accessibility insisted on keeping it, as many players were already used to it.
This dispute was resolved by one employee who decided to combine two approaches to the implementation of the mechanics.
Braga said that one of the animators who worked on AI (enemies) "took it a little too personally because he hated manual reloading":
Then he told us: "I keep dying because of this, so I'll offer my solution." And added: "I think I can do it better — turn it into a matter of choice, so that it's immersive and still retains an element of accessibility."
As a result, he made it so that if the player in Arc Raiders presses the "reload" button himself, it is performed faster.
If the magazine is completely empty, then the weapon "jams" — after that, it automatically reloads, but much slower.
