Arc Raiders launches today across PC and console and it’s already tearing up the charts on Steam. The influx of players means some are experiencing day-one server issues, even as the extraction shooter is propelled into the Valve-owned storefront’s top-10 most-played games.
Despite being $40, Embark Studios’ latest PVPVE game is already climbing past free-to-play games like Naraka: Bladepoint and Apex Legends. It’s currently ranked seventh overall with over 160,000 concurrent players and remains the best-selling game across all of Steam at the moment. Not bad for a Thursday release when most people are still at work or in school.
But the initial flood of players did bring with it some early server problems. Some players got kicked from the game with a screen that read “online connection error” while others faced a problem called “network timeout” in which the game said it had failed to retrieve their data from the backend services. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like these issues were super widespread and they appear to be resolving as we get further from when Arc Raiders first went live earlier today.
The pitch for Arc Raiders is straightforward enough. You play as a fighter scavenging through a post-apocalyptic world that feels trapped in the surreal analog years of the late ’70s, early ’80s in the best way. You collect loot, battle other players, and try to take down powerful computer-controlled machines called Arcs. It’s from Embark Studios, which also shipped The Finals, and shows potential for helping the extraction shooter genre break out beyond the notoriously hardcore communities that usually play them.
It’s currently sitting at a rating of over 80 percent positive on Steam with 1,000 reviews in so far. “I didn’t know bots could hold grudges, but apparently Embark Studios wrote the AI like, ‘If player breathes, hunt player,’” wrote one early player. “Each encounter feels alive, unpredictable, and truly earned,” another wrote. A third was more succinct: “Pew, pew, pew.”
But not everyone’s buzzing. There have been calls for less emphasis on paid cosmetics and the addition of a solo mode. Some players have also called for a PVE-only option, speculating that the launch would be that much bigger if Arc Raiders had gone the Helldivers 2 route. “PvE Isn’t a Threat, Karen – It’s Just Another Way to Play,” reads one of the most active threads on the Steam Discussion page. Some hardcore fans don’t want the option “diluting” the experience. Others think the extraction shooter could be one of the biggest games of the year with it.
Is there AI slop in Arc Raiders?
You might have noticed an generative AI warning on the Arc Raiders Steam page. “During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation,” it reads. “In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.” Embark’s previous game also used generative AI for its in-match announcer commentary.
“Arc Raiders in no way uses generative AI whatsoever,” design director Virgil Watkins claimed during a new interview with PCGamesN. “We use something called machine learning, or reinforcement learning, and that’s to do with the locomotion for our larger drones with multiple legs, but there’s no generative content whatsoever.”
Studio boss Patrick Soderlund elaborated on that process in a different interview with The Game Business this week. “If you ask for [development that’s] 100 times faster, you have to take what you know and basically throw that away and then start really thinking about what type of modifications and transformation do we need to go through in order to completely change the way that we approach this,” he said. “So that’s when we came into procedurally generated content, to using AI and machine learning to some extent in even the content creation pipelines, to what types of tools we build, and realizing that a lot of these tools that we’ve been working with for so long stem from software that’s 25 to 30 years old.”
While Arc Raiders also uses the text-to-speech AI for voicing certain character lines, it doesn’t sound like the visuals or any other objects directly visible in the game were made with generative AI tools. Whether the development team’s assurances get your slop senses tingling is another question entirely.
