There’s an interesting relationship between what developer Embark Studios is doing with new updates, like the recent Arc Raiders Flashpoint update, and what it can feasibly do with the technology available to it. In the future, as machine learning research lead Martin Singh-Blom told me at GDC, Embark will surely develop new tools and techniques that may enable ideas that weren’t possible in the past – for instance, rope physics sophisticated enough to support attacking large Arc with tripwires.

“I think we all have different ideas,” Singh-Blom says. “Those of us who really work with the physics and make things happen with physics of course want more physics in the game at every turn. We want ropes to pull at legs and wires to trip them, like the Hoth invasion scene in Star Wars where they have the speeders and wrap up the legs. We could do that if we just had better rope physics, right?”