Arc Raiders is under siege from a dizzying array of exploits that strike the game from every angle. Automated aimbots lock onto targets through walls, snap to heads with surgical precision, and eliminate recoil entirely. Even skilled players often find themselves eliminated before they can react, turning tense firefights into exercises in frustration rather than skill. For one, the tougher Arc enemies — your Bombardiers, Rocketeers, Leapers, and so on — all typically spawn in the same places on each map. If you’re a frequenter of Buried City, you’ll no doubt have seen the Rocketeer that circles around the Grandioso Apartments countless times.
ARC Raiders’ Steam Performance Across Its First Month
Self-preservation seems to outweigh other functions when it comes to human nature. On top of that, the game has been heavily criticized for its reliance on AI‑generated art in cosmetic elements and for leaning into a “live service plus annual box release” model that resets purchases and progression from previous entries. For a significant slice of the audience, paying a premium price tag for a campaign that feels constrained by online systems arc wallhack and a multiplayer suite packed with microtransactions is a step too far. The community completed that unlock in roughly a day, which meant that during Black Ops 7’s debut weekend, ARC Raiders players had an entirely fresh map to explore. That kind of synchronized content beat is a textbook way to hold attention when a giant competitor shows up. After a monumental first few months, 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for ARC Raiders.
Both Matchmaking Systems Work Together In Each Mode
Other users complained that Arc Raiders’ exploits are the reason the game is getting too difficult. The topic of Arc Raiders having a skill gap issue first kicked off after a video by Twitch streamer TimTheTatman went viral online. In the clip, the streamer claimed that Arc Raiders was starting to have a skill gap situation similar to Fortnite. For context, the Epic Games battle royale had a situation early on where some players became so good at building that they started to dominate other users.
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Hello there, I’m Aleksander Grøndal, the Executive Producer for ARC Raiders and today I want to discuss everything you need to know about what’s in the game. They’re surprisingly difficult, and that’s part of what makes the game so refreshing. A couple of standard drones can easily kill you with the one-two punch of a stun shot and a hail of machine gun fire, and the rocket-firing ships and other large ARC are brutes. Embark Studios has outlined its plan to deal with Arc Raiders cheaters after they became a hot topic in the community earlier this week. Where to find the quest, what the game asks you to do, and how it fits into the early Valley IV side content. Turn Aketine and Amethyst Parts into Industrial Explosives so you can clear Blight, open blocked paths, and finish key quests.
The Unwritten Rules for Success in ARC Raiders
Under a year later, its direct sequel opened at around a third of that, despite similar distribution across Steam, Battle.net, and PC Game Pass. It was thought that the 1.0 launch of Escape from Tarkov might halt ARC Raiders where it stands, but even that wasn’t enough to pull hundreds of thousands of players out of Embark’s all-new extraction shooter. It was the most searched video game of the year according to Google, and was one of Steam’s best-selling games by revenue in 2025. Not only has it hit yet another sales milestone, but it also set a new record for its daily active users, with over 3.2 million players tuning in yesterday, January 4, to spend their final hours of the winter/holiday break playing some ARC Raiders. Streamers, long-time players, and high-profile contributors openly voice frustration over how rampant these exploits have become. Frequent disruptions from cheaters affect not just individual sessions, but the emotional payoff of playing.
Camping an Extraction Point is Bad Manners
The speed and variety of these exploits, combined with how quickly new ones appear, suggest systemic weaknesses rather than isolated incidents. As one exploit is patched, another surfaces, often even more destructive than the last. The planet has suffered an ecological disaster that has wiped out most of the population and most technology. Now, a robotic alien invasion force named Arc has arrived to plunder all the remaining natural resources and kill off humanity, forcing everyone to flee underground, where a vast subterranean city named Toledo has been built.
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Because yes, this is an extraction shooter, and ARC aren’t always the most deadly thing you’ll face topside. Other players you encounter could be friendly, or they could want to avoid searching all the drawers, car hoods and electrical cabinets in favor of murdering you and looting your corpse instead. Players are using scripts to automate weapon firing and exploit weapon swap speed glitches, performing maneuvers that would be nearly impossible to execute manually. Weapons fire with inhuman precision, and the ability to switch between guns almost instantly allows cheaters to chain attacks perfectly, overwhelming anyone playing legitimately. This makes firefights feel completely unfair, turning skill-based encounters into exercises in frustration for honest players.
ARC Raiders Just Helped Steam Break a Huge Record
Customize your Raider to fit your playstyle with a plethora of Weapons, everything from the Rattler a simple automatic rifle, to Vulcano – a close range shotgun, to more high tech weapons like energy weapons like the Equalizer and more. There is a lot to choose from here, and you can further specialize your weapons by adding attachments or taking them to your workshop for full on upgrade. This milestone puts into context just how popular Arc Raiders is, and how quickly it’s managed to rise up to sit comfortably with some of the biggest releases in the last few years, let alone 2025, which was a pretty strong year for shooters. As this article was written, ARC Raiders was the third-most popular game on Steam, beaten only by Valve’s titans, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2. It has topped Call of Duty, Battlefield 6, Marvel Rivals, PUBG, and Where Winds Meet this weekend with ease. Every death, loss, or failed extraction carries the suspicion that it wasn’t skill that determined the outcome, but an exploit, macro, or devious file edit giving someone an unfair edge.
Arc Raiders’ Skill Gap Is Getting Out of Hand, According to the People Playing It
Additional cosmetics can be unlocked by completing quests, leveling up, being unlocked in Raider Decks or be purchased in the in-game store. You can customise your raider with different Faces, Face Styles, Hair Styles and Body type. Additionally you can choose cosmetics that come with a wide array of color options and detail toggles that let you define your style. No Raider is complete without a Backpack, so you will have options there as well as backpack attachment and charm.
- Every fight and non-violent interaction with another player is unique and sticks in the memory, giving you a biography’s worth of war stories for each map that you can look back on as fond memories.
- On Arc Raiders’ Steam page, Embark flags the game as using “procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation.” Design leadership has been explicit that the studio does not use “generative AI” for visual content.
- Not only that, but ARC Raiders maintains a phenomenal track record in terms of user ratings, boasting a score of 88% on Steam from more than 100,000 reviews.
- For context, the Epic Games battle royale had a situation early on where some players became so good at building that they started to dominate other users.
- Despite the controversies around SBMM in those titles, the combination of other tools might make it work in this game.
- For people who avoid in-game voice chat because of anxiety, accent bias, or harassment, being able to “speak” as a Raider voice while still using natural speech rhythm feels like a meaningful accessibility and safety gain.
- For the benefit of all players, prioritizing ARCs over other Raiders is often the best course of action.
Launch Tower Loot Event Guide in Arc Raiders
Reports of cheaters seem to be increasing in recent weeks, as players share clips and stories of others shooting them through walls and from unreachable areas. The conversation then reached a boiling point when popular streamers like Ninja, Nadeshot, and Shroud began publicly voicing their concerns. While Call of Duty wrestles with a down year on PC, ARC Raiders has been on a steady climb. Embark Studios’ extraction shooter landed on October 30 and kept pulling players in through its third weekend, rather than cooling off. For Black Ops 7, the more worrying comparison is not ARC Raiders, but its own predecessor. Black Ops 6 launched on Steam with a peak of roughly 315,000 concurrent players.
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The same goes for the Leaper on Spaceport, wandering around the base of the Launch Towers. That contrast has become a focal point for critics who might otherwise have shrugged at a few synthetic barks in a sci‑fi shooter. The dissonance doesn’t come from a clever meta‑commentary inside the story; it comes from production choices around the story, choices that feel out of step with the game’s own emotional core. Players emerge from underground to fight unfeeling robot harvesters, scrape together resources, and carve out space for human agency.
ARC Raiders Estimated to Have Surpassed 12M Copies Sold and Hit New DAU Record
The fact our Arc Raiders interactive maps show exactly where to find each type of Arc foe on every map shouldn’t be possible, because dynamic spawns would result in more unpredictable gameplay. And even though some players have already completed most or all of these things, ARC Raiders still has more to come that is just around the corner. On forums and social platforms, the most common complaints narrow in on the NPC delivery.
- Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, and anyone who has paid a visit to Research & Administration on Dam Battlegrounds or Medical Research on Stella Montis can attest to this.
- A developer at Embark Studios has clarified previous comments from the studio’s CEO regarding the controversial aggression-based matchmaking system in its hit third-person extraction shooter, ARC Raiders.
- Black Ops 6 launched on Steam with a peak of roughly 315,000 concurrent players.
- Your workshop itself can be upgraded too and as you progress you will be able to craft more and better gear.
- That pattern makes it extremely likely that Black Ops 7 is attracting a much larger audience than its Steam count implies, especially once holiday console sales are factored in.
- This could be gameplay items you can use to your advantage or items you can bring back to craft with.
By numbers, ARC Raiders is the most popular and successful extraction shooter ever made, and it’s dominating the genre. It hasn’t even dropped below 250K concurrent players since launch, according to SteamDB. Its staying power has been impressive, to say the least, and it wouldn’t be surprising at all if the defining game of 2026 was this third-person extraction shooter from October 2025. You could say “no two matches are alike” about plenty of online multiplayer games, and it’s a statement that is certainly true for Arc Raiders.
On Arc Raiders’ Steam page, Embark flags the game as using “procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation.” Design leadership has been explicit that the studio does not use “generative AI” for visual content. Instead, the standout applications are reinforcement learning for enemy movement and a machine-learned TTS system for voices. You play as a raider making daring trips topside to scavenge ruined towns and facilities. As you go on more raids, your character earns experience points, which can be spent on improving their survival, looting and movement abilities, and finds blueprints that enable them to make more stuff. You can also carry out missions for traders, who will reward you with useful items.
ARC Raiders Added PvP After Realizing a PvE-Only Game Wouldn’t Work
Whether you treat the game as an exciting case study in new tools or as a warning shot about where those tools can lead, it’s hard to pretend its use of AI is incidental. In a shooter about surviving a world run by machines, the machines are already in the booth. Its reinforcement learning for robotic enemies is a clear technical win that makes fights feel more dynamic. CEO Junghun Lee has said players should assume that “every game company is now using AI,” and framed the key question as how studios will differentiate when everyone has access to roughly the same tools.
Your first location will be Dam Battlegrounds, a map that offers forests, swamps, old research centers and apartment buildings. We also have larger machines like the Leaper, who patrols outside and poses massive threat with its destructive leap attack. Embark confirmed it is taking action against the cheating problem in a message posted in its official Discord server. The note comes with an acknowledgement of the discussion surrounding cheaters in the community, promising that the studio is “taking this issue very seriously” as it awaits further feedback. If you play primarily on PC and care about where the energy is right now, ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6 have the momentum. If your friends are on console and live in the Call of Duty ecosystem, Black Ops 7 will likely still be the default every‑night shooter, even in a comparatively down year.
Embark has mentioned efforts to crack down on all the cheating are ongoing, but they need to get a handle on all these problems fast, or they could cause irrepairable damage to the game long term. This is the biggest problem with the game, according to the hivemind of the Arc Raiders’ subreddit right now, with a number of posts getting lots of attention. The simplest solution is to make it a schedule that rotates for an odd number of hours. Once you know where the Arc enemies are going to be, it’s far easier to avoid them. It’d undoubtedly make the game more unforgiving if these spawns were more random, but there should be an element of it.
- The Traders of Speranza are central figures in the community, and as you will find out – they often have different agendas.
- Due to the abundance of PvE systems, the SBMM in ARC Raiders feels a lot less strict than other shooters like Black Ops 7 or Battlefield 6.
- When even long-time Call of Duty fans say they have “been playing Battlefield 6 so much” that they did not realize Black Ops 7 had launched, that is less about platform splits and more about mindshare.
- Players emerge from underground to fight unfeeling robot harvesters, scrape together resources, and carve out space for human agency.
According to fans of the extraction shooter, the multiplayer is becoming the next Fortnite in terms of skill level differences between players. It reached almost half a million concurrent PC players during the same weekend Black Ops 7 launched, roughly five times the Call of Duty title’s peak on that platform. That number also represented a new high for ARC Raiders, which had already climbed past its previous record of around 416,000 concurrent players only ten days after release. Arc Raiders has been on a monumental run since it launched a couple of weeks back. Earlier today, the game recorded a peak player count of 481,966 users, a new high and a stunning figure for any extraction shooter.
Due to the abundance of PvE systems, the SBMM in ARC Raiders feels a lot less strict than other shooters like Black Ops 7 or Battlefield 6. You have to appreciate how reactive these robot enemies are to your shots, too. ARC Raiders was originally built as a co-op game and you can see that lineage in how much attention has been given to making enemies satisfying to fight. Shoot a rotor off a drone and they spin wildly depending on physics and momentum, before finally stabilizing themselves to return fire. Shoot off another and they spin out before crashing into the ground, sometimes going down guns-blazing. The larger enemies lose plating, spark, fizzle and smoke as you riddle them with bullets.