Now that Arc Raiders PvE playtest has come to an end, Embark Studios has acknowledged some of the early feedback and knows it hasn't been a win in everyone's eyes.

In a post on the Arc Raiders website, Embark noted that the PvE matchmaking toggle test has ended, thanking players who completed over 30 million PvE rounds during the testing period. This post then urged players to join the Arc Raiders Discord and complete a survey coming out soon to make their voices heard on how they felt about the test and how it should be factored in going forward.

Embark notes "we need a bit of time to understand what the data is telling us, and what our community is saying," before it can take the next steps with the mode, saying that "our decision on how to proceed will prioritize the overall health and enjoyability of the game." But the post notes that "On a surface reading, we know that the test has been polarizing."

This was seen throughout the week-long test, too, with early reactions to the mode ranging from it making Arc Raiders feel "bland, soulless" and ruining the game's tension to others saying it's the game they wanted all along. But between the two extremes is a lot of people who find the lowered stakes kind of boring. Arc Raiders streamer Loochy says, "The reality is Arc Raiders doesn’t have a strong enough endgame to support a meaningful PvE experience," calling the mode "hollow," but at the least that's something the developers can target.

As for when we'll hear more about the PvE mode and what the developers have found from the data, Embark says, "We don’t yet know what the outcome of the data analysis will be, but we expect to be able to follow up with further information in November."

Arc Raiders devs had the same debates players are currently having over PvE mode, but the "dad gamers" pushed them to try it anyway

Arrowhead Studios has confirmed that Helldivers 2 will transition to Easy Anti-Cheat this week and acknowledged what that means for mods.

In a post on the Helldivers 2 Steam page, Arrowhead says that at some point today, October 20, the game will transition from GameGuard to Easy Anti-Cheat "with additional security tools in place to enhance its effectiveness and improve game integrity protection," as well as implementing "additional security measures" to target cheating mods that have been circulating around the game's community. The post explains, "The implementation of GameGuard for Helldivers 2 wasn't as effective as it could have been, and in the end we decided to take another path with EAC."

This post also sees the Arrowhead team comment on the Helldivers 2 modding community. While the studio notes that it has mostly refrained from doing so, this update gives it an opportunity to do just that.

"We know mods are part of the DNA of PC gaming and gaming communities as a whole," the post reads, adding, "we appreciate the creativity behind cosmetic and non-gameplay mods, which players can enjoy without negatively impacting those who play alongside them." However, Arrowhead notes, "Where we need to improve is how we protect players against modifications that create unfair advantages or negatively impact others."

Arrowhead explains that those gameplay modifications may no longer function; however, this also extends to "some non-malicious cosmetic mods," which the team notes "may require updates from their individual creators in order to keep working."

The update hasn't exactly gone down well with the community, as many note that they are using gameplay mods to fix lingering issues in the base game, such as stratagem bouncing and hitbox issues.

Be sure to check out our guide to everything found in the new Helldivers 2 Scope of Authority Warbond.

The Helldivers 2 Scope of Authority Warbond is out now, bringing multiple sniper-themed gear and weapons that generally push players towards long-range and stealthy combat. It's a warbond that comes with three different sniper weapons, including the massive Apex belt-fed anti-materiel rifle. There are also two armor sets that come with a passive that makes long-range shooting much easier and comes with a fancy adaptive camouflage system too – the first of its kind in Helldivers 2. I've laid out everything in the Scope of Authority Warbond below and what you need to know.

All Helldivers 2 Scope of Authority Warbond gear

The Scope of Authority Warbond went live on October 20, 2026, available on the Superstore for 1,000 Helldivers 2 Super Credits or one Helldivers 2 Warbond Token if you've got one. Here's everything you can get for that Warbond:

• PAGE 1
  • Weapons:
    • R-40 Sightliner (Primary) (35 Medals): Bolt-action sniper rifle that fires powerful armor-piercing rounds for some serious long-range precision fire, with Heavy Armor Penetration.
    • G-11 Caltrops (Throwable) (35 Medals): A mine that scatters smaller submunitions when deployed. These submunitions are proximity-detonated and both damage and stun enemies hit by them.
  • Armor
    • SS-33 Mimetic Marshal (45 Medals): Light armor with the Stationary Shroud passive. Reduces weapon sway when moving and reduces enemy detection range while stationary, crouched, or prone.
    • SS-33 Mimetic Marshal Helmet (30 Medals).
  • Cosmetics
    • Mimetic Mesh Cape (8 Medals)
    • Mimetic Mesh Player Card (2 Medals)
  • 100 Super Credits (7 Medals)
• TOTAL PAGE COST = 162 Medals

• PAGE 2
  • Strategems
    • Apex (Support Weapon/Backpack) (50 Medals): A massive backpack-fed anti-materiel rifle made for taking down heavy foes at long-range. If you've got a Helldiver spotter nearby, they can provide a reload assist too. Rounds have Anti-Tank capacity, despite being listed as Heavy Armor Penetration. Requires a Stationary Reload. If you fire the weapon from standing, you're knocked back, so make sure you're crouched or prone!
  • Armor
    • SS-15 Focal Point (55 Medals): Medium armor with the Stationary Shroud passive. Reduces weapon sway when moving and reduces enemy detection range while stationary, crouched, or prone.
    • SS-15 Focal Point Helmet (45 Medals).
  • Cosmetics
    • Boundary Banner Cape (25 Medals)
    • Boundary Banner Player Card (7 Medals)
  • 100 Super Credits (12 Medals)
• TOTAL PAGE COST = 194 Medals

• PAGE 3
  • Weapons
    • P-44 Mist (Secondary) (65 Medals): A one-handed SMG/machine pistol with light armor penetration.
  • Strategems
    • Nova (Support Weapon) (110 Medals): An energy rifle with a scope that has to be charged briefly before each Heavy Armor Penetrating shot.
  • Cosmetics
    • Manual Ballistic Projection Protocol Emote/Victory Pose (20 Medals)
    • Longshot Title (20 Medals)
  • 100 Super Credits (32 Medals)
• TOTAL PAGE COST = 247 Medals
• TOTAL COST OF ALL REWARDS = 603 Medals

Helldivers 2 Scope of Authority Superstore gear

Though not tied officially to the Warbond, there is also a new page of Superstore Gear for the Scope of Authority update. That gear is as follows:

• SS-500 Pale Prosecutor (250 SC). Light armor with the Stationary Shroud passive
• SS-500 Pale Prosecutor helmet (125 SC)
• Arctic Decree Cape (100 SC)
• Arctic Decree Player Card (35 SC)

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Marvel Rivals has long suffered with bad actors throwing around hate speech in online matches, but in an effort to clean up the hero shooter, developer NetEase is now promising "significantly harsher penalties" for severe or repeat offenders.

Like many competitive multiplayer games, unfortunately, Marvel Rivals has a problem with toxic speech being used more frequently than one would expect. In a recent online post, NetEase says it's doubling down on moderating the game.

"A positive communication environment is a vital component of any team-based competitive experience," the studio tweets. "We have always prioritized speech moderation in-game, and we continue to pay close attention to your feedback regarding toxic behavior. Whether through text or voice chat, behaviors such as insults, malicious harassment, discrimination, and hate speech not only hurt other players but also destroy normal in-game communication and the overall match experience."

NetEase says it has now "further escalated our penalties for speech violations" and sanctions will differ depending on the "nature, severity and historical record of the violation." The developer will also dish out "significantly harsher penalties against players involved in severe offenses or repeated violations."

"We respect the right of our players to express differing opinions, but normal communication and discussion should never become an excuse for malicious attacks, discrimination, or the harassment of others. Our stance on moderating toxic speech is clear and resolute. We will absolutely not treat these behaviors as acceptable simply because they are unfortunately common in competitive gaming," it adds. Hear, hear.

The Marvel Rivals developer isn't stopping here, either - it calls speech moderation an "ongoing, long-term commitment" and will "continually refine our systems" to spot and penalize toxic behavior in the future.

Many in the Marvel Rivals subreddit agreed that toxic speech had seeped too deep into the game. "I haven't played in weeks," one person writes. "The game has its fun and its problems, but what really put me off was not being able to actually use chat without players letting off their in real-life racial frustrations on other players in a Disney Marvel game."

Not everyone is confident in NetEase's ability to identify actual toxic behavior, though. Some players report that the game sometimes incorrectly flags most swear words - even ones used in compliments - as offences.

"If they have a human review toxicity instead of an AI that would be far better," another player writes.

Marvel Rivals devs try not to spoil Avengers Doomsday ahead of MCU event: "We are doing everything we can to prevent any leaks"

What should an Arc Raiders TV series or movie look like? Following the slightly opaque announcement of adaptations in the works at external partner Chernin Entertainment, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal of Arc Raiders studio Embark suggests there's interest in something a little more character-driven, whereas the game is mostly about absorbing the world around you.

I spoke to Grøndal briefly about the ambitions around the adaptations of Embark's IP, which will also include The Finals, its previous, more competitive shooter. Arc Raiders is pretty hands-off with its narrative, mostly sprinkling in details through thin quests, short cutscenes, and cinematic trailers, but while letting players write their own stories and speculate about the world. That works for an interactive game, but a series or film may need something clearer to carry the story.

"I think you're absolutely right," Grøndal responds. "We feel like we have created a world that's fertile ground to tell all kinds of different stories. I think it's really interesting to try to explore that, what that would mean, and see what comes out of it. I'm pretty excited. Of course, we all have to see what the concepts are for that. But I'm excited to see how far we can take that."

Embark has its hands full and isn't a TV or film crew in the first place, but even with Chernin Entertainment taking the reins, the creators of Arc Raiders will naturally be involved.

"Of course, we will be involved in some capacity," Grøndal says. "It's important for us to find a partner that we really can trust, and that understands what Arc Raiders is and what we're trying to do, and can capture the essence of what makes this brand interesting and special. And we believe we found that in Chernin. So we will have to let the craftsmen do what they're best at, and we will come with our input in terms of how we maintain the brand perspective over time, and make sure that we kind of feel like it's coherent with our vision for where we want to take Arc Raiders over time."

Arc Raiders is known as a story generator where players fight over resources, backstab each other, and – surprisingly frequently – form temporary alliances without hesitation. But it's about the last vestiges of humanity working to survive long enough to understand and repel a machine threat that has effectively taken over the surface of Earth in the late 22nd century.

There's a retrofuturist veneer to the world that I think fans of the Fallout TV series could vibe with, and the looming mystery of the titular Arc's origins – which will seemingly be addressed in-game fairly soon – gives the somewhat Gray Goo Scenario premise a nice little hook. Which is to say: in a world where the Fallout show is remarkably good, I could actually see Arc Raiders working pretty well on the big screen if Chernin can anchor it in characters who are more compelling than the purpose-before-personality cast of the game.

Arc Raiders devs had the same debates players are currently having over PvE mode, but the "dad gamers" pushed them to try it anyway.

Taking Stock in Arc Raiders is a quest where players have to find Industrial Batteries and take photographs of key locations, all for the Nomads back at Speranza. This is a quest that will take you both to Stella Montis' Atrium, and to the wreckage at Spaceport to find a Baron Husk. No matter what stage of the Taking Stock quest is giving you trouble, my walkthrough will take you through all three stages and key locations, so you know exactly what you're looking for.

How to complete Taking Stock in Arc Raiders

The Taking Stock quest in Arc Raiders is broken up into several stages that can be completed in any order. They are:

• On Stella Montis, take a photo of the sculpture in the Atrium
• On Spaceport, take a photo of a Baron Husk
• Complete either of the following:
  • On Dam Battlegrounds, ping a Bombardier
  • On Buried City, ping a Bastion
• Deliver 3 Industrial Batteries to the Nomadic Envoys

Keep in mind that you'll need to bring a Camera with you for the Stella Montis and Spaceport objectives. You can craft these in your workshop, or buy them from the traders in Speranza.

On Stella Montis, take a photo of the sculpture in the Atrium

The Atrium Sculpture is found in the Centre/East side of Stella Montis, specifically in the dead middle of the Atrium area itself. It's the large, symmetrical white shape that dominates the room, it's pretty hard to miss once you're in there (as shown below). A photo of it from any angle should be sufficient to tick off this objective.

On Spaceport, take a photo of a Baron Husk

There are actually three Baron Husks in Spaceport, huge broken Arc Robots that are usually found slumped over the exterior walls around the edge of the region. We've marked all their locations on the map above, as well as showing you an image of what you're looking for below. Any angle should be sufficient to mark this quest off the map.

Ping a Bombardier or a Bastion

When it comes to simply pinging a Bombardier or Bastion, you're to some extent dependant on luck and randomisation. However, for the best chance, I recommend you go to central Buried City, specifically around Marano Park. Both robots have a high chance to spawn in that area, as well as on top of the Parking Garage that overlooks it from the North. It's not guaranteed (especially if you're spawning in late in the match and somebody's already killed them), but it's the best chance you can have. You don't even need to shoot at them - just mark them and move on.

How to get Industrial Batteries

Finally, you need to acquire three Industrial Batteries to give to the Nomads. These are rare Industrial items that aren't easily found and never guaranteed, but there are some good places to search for a higher chance. They are:

• Car hoods in any location.
• Dam Battlegrounds
  • Hydroponic Dome Complex
  • Power Generation Complex
  • Water Treatment Control
  • Scrap Yard
• Spaceport
  • Container Storage
  • Rocket Assembly
  • Vehicle Maintenance
  • Shipping Warehouse
• Stella Montis
  • Loading Bay
  • Lobby Metro
• Riven Tides
  • Stacking Yard
• Pendola Pass
  • Railyard
  • Loading Platforms
  • Piazza della Rupe

Make sure you put them in your safe pocket when you find them, and keep them back in your Speranza storage until you have all three stacked up and ready to go. You can't buy or craft Industrial Batteries, so make sure you preserve the ones you find!

Once you've completed all the objectives, go back to the Nomadic Envoy and finish the quest to get the following rewards:

• 8000 XP
• Jolt Mines x2
• Advanced Electrical Component x1

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Bullies in Arc Raiders were added as part of the Frozen Trail update, and quickly became one of the most perniciously persistent foes that players can expect to go up against. The Bully is somewhere between the Bombardier and the Leaper, a fast-moving enemy that rapidly sprints in the player's direction, keeping up a constant barrage of shotgun blasts and grenade attacks that give little chance for retaliation or recovery. Defeating one isn't easy, even if you're well-equipped for it, but below I'll explain how to defeat Bullies, including their weak spots and weaknesses.

Bullies' weak points and weaknesses in Arc Raiders

The weak spot on Bullies in Arc Raiders are their leg joints, marked by yellow. Hitting exterior plates on the legs also makes its weak spots easier to target and gives you more options.

There's one other weak point, but not an easy one: down the barrel of the turret itself before it's about to fire. If you shoot the turret with a powerful armor-penetrating weapon just before it's about to fire, where the armor plating opens up, you can effectively stun it for a few seconds and cancel the shot it's about to make. It's hard to do, and leaves you vulnerable to attack from one of the deadliest shots in Arc Raiders if you screw it up, but it's something to keep in mind if you're caught out in the open.

Finally, the other weakness of the Bully is energy weapons, especially those with high armor penetration. These tend to do higher damage to it, shredding its armor and whittling it down. The Aphelion is especially good for this purpose, though obviously the rarity and value of energy weapons means that you're taking on a risk bringing them into combat.

Best Bully combat stategy and tips in Arc Raiders

Once you're in combat with a Bully, there are certain strategies and combat tips to keep in mind that will give you the best chance. Some require specific equipment, but others are more generalized.

• Stay high up. The Bully can outrun you, but it can't climb. Firing down from rooftops or an elevated position it can't reach offers you a minimal level of safety.
• Attack from small windows. Even better than height, an elevated small window makes it difficult for the Bully to hit you back. Its grenades are too wide-spread to reliably go through the window, while the shotgun gives enough warning for you to duck backwards into cover.
• If you see grenades coming, run! The bully fires an arcing spread of timed explosives that cover a wide area. You have a brief pause before they go off, which you'll need to get out of their blast radius. The moment you see them coming, sprint away and wait for them to detonate.
• Pin it down with equipment. The Bully's weak points can be hard to target because of the fast and erratic way it moves. Using the Showstopper or Yank Grenade can stun or hold it down long enough for you either to land some weak spot shots, or to plant a Deadline mine on its shell.
• Use armor-piercing early on to break its shell. Weapons like the Hullcracker won't do huge amounts of damage to it, but like the Arc Raiders Bastions, it's got removable armor plating that'll leave it highly vulnerable to attacks from regular weapons.
• Explosive can overturn it. If you're lucky, a large explosion and uneven terrain can flip the Bully onto its back. It will right itself if given enough time to thrash around, but this is a good moment to unleash hell on it.

It'll take time no matter what you do - the Bully is pretty durable - but once beaten the Bully will split into multiple pieces you can scavenge. The only unique item it drops is the Bully Fragmenter, an Epic crafting item that can be used for the level 3 Research Station, among other things.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Arc Raiders is finally trying out a PvE-only mode, and it's gone exactly as you'd expect. After the limited-time release of a PvE toggle, fierce opinions have hit the game's community faster than Bastion bullets to my temple after I misclick my photoelectric cloak, and the test has only just begun. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal tells me that, inside developer Embark Studios, similar debates about a PvE mode raged, but the team decided the "dad gamers" deserve a fair shot.

At the risk of splitting the game in two, Embark chose to finally bite the bullet after realizing that players had practically done the legwork for them.

"We kind of got to the point where it's like, these friendly servers, they are almost playing out like they don't have PvP in them at all, and people seem to be enjoying that," Grøndal observes. "We could see that group of people was consistently growing a little bit over the history of the game."

Grøndal tips his hat to "a group of, let's call them dad gamers for lack of a better word" who are the imagined casual gamer made manifest. They have "a couple of hours to play every now and then and just want to go out and complete some objectives. Every time they feel like they get defeated by someone extraction camping or someone else with higher gear, it's just frustration for them. And they express this pretty vocally. 'I love the game, I just want to play the game, but I really don't like dealing with other players in that way.' OK, we hear you. If you like the game that you are playing, and if we just remove the pain the other players are giving you, that's a fairly simple thing we can try to implement."

You can see how simply this PvE toggle was done. Almost immediately, players started to poke holes in this trial implementation of PvE Arc Raiders, griefing loot and bullying Arc who were unprepared to face raiders who have nothing else to shoot at. If Embark does decide to make PvE mode a permanent option in the future, it would want some finer tuning. And after plenty of debate inside the studio, with many developers echoing concerns around tension and the loot economy and difficulty, Grøndal reckons those decisions are better off informed by live data.

"But at the same time, we didn't want to commit to this fully before we fully understand what their actual needs are, hence the test," he says. "I thought it was important that, let's not just open the door and implement this solution. It might not be the answer to the question, and rather than just sitting and asking ourselves forever or designing an overly complicated feature to test it out, we went, OK, what is the obvious answer staring back at us? The matchmaking toggle test.

"That's how it came to be, and we're really excited to see the reception, what players think about that, as I'm sure we'll take tons of learnings and then see how we can take those learnings into further developing what this could be – without making any promises, of course. I think that's important to mention."

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail patch notes are full of sentences that players have dreamed of for a year: "You can now open the map while downed."

A PvE playtest is currently happening in Arc Raiders, and some first impressions aren't strong for the mode. A contingent of players isn't happy with how the dynamic feels compared to the standard experience, even expressing regret that they wished this had been added in the first place.

Embark Studios kicked off a week-long public beta for PVE in Arc Raiders just yesterday, October 13. The idea is that player-on-player damage is removed, forcing everyone to tackle the Arc in front of them and get their loot instead of trying to grief each other,

In theory, it should be a fine addition for the shooter, coming up on its first anniversary, but results have been varied. "I've been playing carebear games for weeks now and I thought PvE would be great," writes a Redditor. "Well, I was wrong. Games feel like a shop simulator, nobody talks, nobody interacts, just go in, loot, bye."

They add they'd vote against player-versus-enemy if such a ballot appeared, and the paranoia from the standard modes now seems fundamental. "I think we need that carebear interaction where people choose to hold their guns, you still have some fear of being shot etc," they add. "Personally I really disliked PvE toggle, game feels bland, soulless."

While players can't shoot you, they can still shove you, as another player pointed out in a frustrating clip on Reddit where they keep getting pushed around while trying to go back to Speranza. "PvE is insufferable," they say. "People bull rush you off ledges, bull rush you to prevent you from looting and then bull rush you to prevent you from extracting."

A commenter points out, the bull rushing can be mitigated through patches. Other players are having more fun. One said they're "having a blast," sharing that they found Arc encounter rate to be similar to regular play, but there appears to be less loot. The responses are mixed between agreeing to being critical, to a more subdued reaction, simply saying it's kind of boring.

That last part is where streamer and video maker Loochy stands. He found PvE "got kind of boring after a few rounds" because of lowered tension. "The reality is Arc Raiders doesn’t have a strong enough endgame to support a meaningful PvE experience," he says on Twitter. "It just feels hollow."

If this debate has you curious, you have until October 20 to give this playtest a go.

As Arc Raiders sees Steam player count surge to 185,000 for the first time in 7 months, Embark dev knows it "won't last forever"

The Arc Raiders Ruins and Reverberations quest follows up on all the messing around with antennas from the previous Wires Crossed mission, as now you have to go to Pendola Pass Observatory and set up a Spotter Relay on one last antenna. In actual fact that there's a few steps that evolve out from that point once you've started, and finding the Spotter Relay isn't the easiest thing in the world either, but I'll lay out everything you need to do for the Ruins and Reverberations quest in this full walkthrough below.

How to complete Ruins and Reverberations in Arc Raiders

Ruins and Reverberations in Arc Raiders has you go to Pendola Pass with the goal to connect a Spotter Relay to the antenna on the roof of the Cielo Sereno Observatory, but in reality there's a secondary challenge that spirals out once complete that first quest that you're not told about. You also need to get a Spotter Relay if you don't already have one in Arc Raiders, which is its own challenge.

How to get a Spotter Relay

Spotter Relays are, suitably enough, dropped by Spotters when you kill them. Spotters are the circular flying drones that hang around Bombardiers and mark players nearby. They're very easy to kill, but the danger is that if they see you, the Bombardier will try to kill you with arcing explosive mortar shots.

It's best to make noise far away to draw the Spotter's attention, then use a stronger weapon to try to drop them before they can spot you. If the Bombardier works out where you are, hide and wait for it to move on before searching the Spotter wreckage.

Connect a Spotter Relay to the antenna on the roof of the Cielo Sereno Observatory

Once you have the Spotter, head into the Pendola Pass map, where you'll find the Cielo Sereno Observatory on the North east side. I heavily recommend you bring either a grappling hook, zipline or snap hook with you.

Once there, head to the exterior roof so you're clambering around on the building. There are several antennas, but the one you want is on the South side, at the halfway point of the building. Interact with it and use the Spotter Relay to get... a bad result. Don't worry, it can be fixed.

Weld the wires in the crawlspace under the control room to redirect power

To find the wires you need to weld, drop through the holes in the roof into the main observatory, then explore the rooms nearby until you find one of the holes in the floor that allow you to explore the darkened crawlspace beneath the entire building, but above the catwalks. Once inside, head as far South as you can go, then follow the corridor down there until you're exactly beneath the antenna, and you'll see the interaction point to weld.

After that you simply need to head back to the roof and interact with the antenna again in order to complete the quest. Keep in mind that when you do, it will generate a very loud noise that both Arc and other players will be able to hear.

However, at that point the quest is over and you'll be able to collect the rewards upon extraction. Those rewards are:

• Smoke Grenade x2
• Looting Mk.3 (Safekeeper) Augment x1
• Electrical Components x3
• Speakers x2
• 5000 XP

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The Wires Crossed quest in Arc Raiders has you go to three different maps and find antennas at key locations for you to attach Arc components to in order to help Celeste. This divides the challenge up into two parts: acquiring the components needed, then hunting down the antenna in Spaceport, Blue Gate, and Buried City respectively. Below I'll take you on a full walkthrough of each step, so you can complete it as easily and painlessly as possible.

How to complete Wires Crossed in Arc Raiders

Wires Crossed in Arc Raiders is a multi-stage quest completed through objectives in multiple maps, each one of which requires you to acquire a specific Arc piece and bring it to a location within the game:

• On the Blue Gate, attach a Snitch Scanner to the antenna at Pilgrim's Peak.
• On Spaceport, attach a Surveyor Vault to the antenna on top of the Launch Towers.
• On Buried City, attach a Sentinel Firing Core to the antenna at the roof of the Grandioso Apartments.

You can find all these items in prior matches and bring them in with you in your loadout, or try to acquire them mid-match. However, I definitely suggest the former, as while Snitches are pretty common in Arc Raiders, Surveyors and Sentinels are far less reliable and frequent.

Attach a Snitch Scanner to the antenna at Pilgrim's Peak

A Snitch Scanner can be obtained by killing the Snitches, unsurprisingly! They're the round little flying robots with searchlights that set of alarms when they see you and summon other Arc robots before disappearing. You need to be quick when you see them, and shoot off at least two of the white rim plates to cause it to crash.

After that, take it to Pilgrim's Peak at the North of Blue Gate. Use a zipline to ascend the highest tower, and the antenna/interaction point is at the midpoint platform on the Southeast side.

Attach a Surveyor Vault to the antenna on top of the Launch Towers

Surveyor Vaults are found in Surveyors, the little rolling balls that open up and fire a blue laser into the sky when undisturbed. You can use these to narrow down the search, but keep in mind that Surveyors are pretty durable and will need to be hit with sustained damage, even as they alternate between knocking you over and trying to escape.

Once you have the Vault, head to Spaceport and to the very top of the Launch Towers, the huge structure in the middle that looms over everything. You can get to the top via ziplines found inside the building, then from the room you're put in, head outside and up the steps so you're standing on the roof. At the corner of the highest level, you'll find the place to attach the Surveyor Vault.

Attach a Sentinel Firing Core to the antenna at the roof of the Grandioso Apartments

Finally, you need to get a Sentinel Firing Core, found inside the Arc Raiders Sentinels, which are the static sniper turrets that appear infrequently and generally in areas with long sightlines. Getting close to a Sentinel can be dangerous, but those with good mobility items can usually climb up the other side of whatever building its on and get behind it. Otherwise, you can have success with sniping duels if you're using something with good range and armor penetration.

Once you have the Sentinel Firing Core, load into Buried City and head to the Grandioso Apartments on the West side of the map. The Apartments are broken up into North and South buildings: you want to go to the rooftop of the South building and check the top-right corner to find the antenna.

For completing the quest, you'll unlock the following:

• Electrical Components x3
• Renegade (Tier I) x1
• Zipline x2
• Crash Mat x2

You'll also unlock a follow-up quest in the chain from Celeste called "Ruins and Reverberations".

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Whatever you may think of it on its own merits, it's safe to say Max Payne 3 didn't quite live up to the previous two. Being developed by Rockstar instead of Remedy Entertainment, the threequel wound up having a different vibe to the neo-noir stylishness of its predecessors, and looking back on it, lead writer Dan Houser admits the team didn't nail the tone.

"It was a linear game, so it was a little different from writing an open-world game, a little more structured. I really enjoyed that as an experience," he recalled to IGN. "I loved what we did design-wise, the way the game didn't have loads, the way it felt like a 12-hour movie, some of the visual stuff we did with words on screen."

After leading the narrative departments of many of the Grand Theft Auto games and the first Red Dead Redemption at that point, Houser had some confidence. His belief during development was that the team was nailing what fans wanted - alas, it was not. "I felt we were creating a really cool digital noir experience, and the consensus at the time was that people hated it," he remembers.

"So I got that completely wrong," he says, candidly. "I know [Max Payne creator] Sam Lake well, and he's a very good guy and really talented. I thought we'd done a good job of doing another Max Payne game. Some people liked it; lots didn't. So we got it wrong, or I got it wrong. I failed. My bit was not a success."

Now that we're 14 years removed, there's a lot to like about the third installment of the series. The gunplay is solid, the setting of Sao Paulo is a fun contrast to the streets of New York City, and the plot is appropriately psychological.

But it is a different energy to Remedy's more reserved approach - not exactly surprising given it's Rockstar - and even today, if you play all three Max Payne games one after the other, you'll notice a difference. "The game is beautifully made, and it wasn't as successful as it should have been," Houser says on reflection. "So I would say a large amount of that failure was on me as one of the people making the decisions and also as the writer, when people really missed his writing."

Sadly, we're still waiting for Max Payne 4. Remedy's working on remakes of the first two. Whether we'll get the trilogy-ender is in Rockstar's hands. But at least we haven't seen the last of the detective just yet.

GTA 6 is coming to PC in just a few months according to new report, with Rockstar moving much faster than it did with GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2

Thermal Shakers in Arc Raiders are used for high level upgrades for the Research Station, and themselves can be deconstructed into high level crafting items if you can get them back to Speranza. However, these are Epic-rarity items that aren't easily pinned down, but fortunately I've found them myself and can show you where to look for these Thermal Shakers.

Arc Raiders Thermal Shaker locations

Thermal Shakers in Arc Raiders are found in Technological and Electrical locations in Pendola Pass, added as part of the Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update. It may be present in other maps, but it definitely spawns in Pendola Pass and I can personally confirm it's found there.

Similar to the Arc Raiders Differential Microphones, I heavily recommend you check the Cielo Sereno Observatory in Pendola Pass. It's a Technological zone that is often a high-level loot location, but keep in mind that the Thermal Shaker is Epic and therefore not guaranteed, even if you can search the entire thing yourself. I've found it in containers that are generally neutral in terms of contents, including metal crates and sliding drawers, as well as on shelves out in the open.

For more help with crafting materials, check out how to find the rarer Arc Raiders Insulation Rolls!

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Differential Microphones in Arc Raiders are crafting items used primarily to unlock the third stage of the Research Station, but the game doesn't give you a huge amount of information on where to look. Fortunately, I've gone ahead and found multiple Differential Microphones to confirm where you need to check for them, and will lay out what you need to know here.

Arc Raiders Differential Microphone locations

To get the Differential Microphone in Arc Raiders you need to search Technological and Electrical locations in Pendola Pass, the map added as part of the Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update, which is where I reliably found these Rare-level items.

It's possible that the Mic can be found in other maps, but Pendola Pass seems to have a particularly high spawn rate at the time of writing. If you're looking for good places to check, I recommend the following two locations:

• Cielo Sereno Observatory: Technological location with a lot of containers, often a High Level Loot area. This is your best bet in the Pendola Pass Map.
• Railroad Junction: An electrical zone North of the Railyard, this isn't particularly valuable in terms of loot, but it does match the conditions needed.

Keep in mind that the Differential Microphone is Rare (though not Epic), so you might have to do a few searches for it to come up. I found it in the open on shelves and counters, as well as in loot-neutral containers like Bins and Crates.

For more help with crafting materials, check out how to find the rarer Arc Raiders Insulation Rolls!

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Insulation Roll in Arc Raiders is a new crafting resource material added as part of the Frozen Trail update, and while it has no use on its own terms, it's used for high level crafting recipes and materials. However, as an Epic-level item with no clear location to search in its description, finding Insulation Roll isn't easy to do. Fortunately having located it myself, I'll lay out where to look in Arc Raiders to find it.

Arc Raiders Insulation Roll locations

I found an Insulation Roll in the Railyard in Pendola Pass, the snowy map added as part of the Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update, specifically inside the train carriages, resting on the seats and countertops out in the open. However, as an Epic Rarity item, it is not guaranteed to show up, and this was only on one occurrence out of several.

Others online have reported seeing it in all the High-Level Loot locations in Pendola Pass, usually in containers associated with high value items like Security Breach lockers. Though I can't personally confirm that yet, there does seem to be broad consensus on this: Insulation Rolls are highly rare items that appear to be somewhat location-neutral, hence why no specific kind of environment is highlighted in the description to narrow down the search.

Out hunting robots? Find out how to profit even more via the Arc Raiders Trophy Display project! Or alternatively, check out where to find the various Arc Raiders blueprints so you can build anything and everything.

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After months of decline, Arc Raiders has seen an enormous resurgence in players thanks to its new Frozen Trail update and recent free trial, but while things are suddenly looking a lot healthier for Embark's shooter, one dev knows it "won't last."

Although Arc Raiders was undoubtedly a massive hit when it launched last year and maintained an extremely strong player count on Steam for months, as with any live service game, things eventually began to dwindle. Until recently, the game hadn't seen a concurrent player count on PC above 100,000 since May, with numbers dropping as low as the low 30,000s in September.

Things changed since October 8 and the release of the big Frozen Trail update, though. That Steam concurrent number flew past 125,000 on the first day of the patch, and this past weekend, went even higher, reaching 185,443 yesterday according to SteamDB. That's still a ways off its all-time record of 481,966, but an enormous improvement on what we've been used to seeing these days. In fact, it's not seen numbers that high since March. But despite it all, even one dev knows this is fleeting, too.

Sharing a screenshot of Arc Raiders' concurrent player count on Steam when it hit 150,000 again, Embark full-stack engineer Leon San José Larsson writes on Twitter: "It won't last forever, of course, but it's great seeing so many people back again after almost a year." As one player suggests that perhaps the number could go higher when Embark implements PvE – it's testing a matchmaking toggle for this for a week starting tomorrow – the dev says: "One can always hope."

It might sound a bit pessimistic, but truthfully, he's not wrong. It's only natural for the player count in live-service games to decline over time as people decide they've had their fill and move on to new things. Big updates like Frozen Trail, as well as things like free weekends, will cause a surge in interest but ultimately just restart the cycle; that doesn't mean a game is dead, either, however.

Palworld dev and Pocketpair Publishing boss John "Bucky" Buckley has been shrugging off the "dead game" comments aimed at the hit survival game for years, but as it continues to hold steady interest, it's clear he has a point.

Will PvE mode split Arc Raiders in two? "It's very possible," says executive producer.

Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update is the talk of the town, but an even bigger change could be on the horizon. From October 13 through October 20, developer Embark will test something that some players have wanted from day one: a pure PvE mode. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal tells me this test is an essential step toward answering a question that even the devs have had since launch, even if it ends up splitting the game in two one day.

Originally, Arc Raiders was a pure PvE game about fighting giant robots. It only pivoted to a PvPvE mix very late in development. The devs also ditched the free-to-play structure and put everything they had into the extraction shooter basket, and miraculously, it paid off. As a result, going back to pure PvE feels like a huge risk.

"Naturally, we were a bit like, 'Are we gonna open this door? What does that mean?'" Grøndal says. "We had that question ongoing for a long time, maybe even too long, to be fair."

An Arc Raiders PvE mode is just a limited test for now, but Grøndal suggests there's potential for much more. I asked if he can imagine a world where Arc Raiders is essentially split into two games – the game we've known, and a pure PvE version – and he reckons "it's very possible."

"I mean, the community is already split along those lines," he continues. "If the game eventually will represent that? Quite possibly. I think it's important to respect how the players want to enjoy the game, even if it doesn't necessarily fully gel with what we thought the game was initially or how we designed the game to be initially. It's possible. Of course, it creates some challenges on our end. We need to figure out what we really mean by that."

For all the demand for it, there are also concerns around what a PvE mode could do to Arc Raiders and how it will feel to play. Will it ruin the game's tension? Will it undermine that beloved camaraderie when you aren't choosing to be friendly? Will it warp the economy or split the player base?

"I mean, all of these are valid risks, right?" Grøndal responds. "Which is one of the reasons why we wanted to run a test which is somewhat limited around some of the higher-end stuff. It will affect, or it has a chance of affecting, the overall experience. This is also why we wanted to just get it out there, look at the data, look at what the feedback says, and then really figure out what the best way forward is.

"I think there's a lot of valid concerns, and internally at the studio, that has been expressed, both sides of that coin. It's not like everyone was high-fiving Aleks when we introduced this idea to do this test. That's not the case. There were some real concerns there too. But at the end of the day, I really feel like we need to answer this question, at least to ourselves, and of course also to the players."

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail patch notes are full of sentences that players have dreamed of for a year: "You can now open the map while downed."

Marvel Rivals developer NetEase is taking extra care to make sure it doesn't leak anything about Avengers Doomsday as it plans a crossover with the MCU film.

2026 has been a big year for the Marvel Rivals team as the developers have been celebrating the four Avengers MCU themes with new cosmetics and modes throughout the year on the Path to Doomsday. This kicked off in April with an Avengers themed event that had a 6v1 asymmetrical mode in which you team up against a single Loki, while this week marks the Infinity War event which will introduce a 2v2 mode in which two teams of 6 players can battle with the Infinity Stones in round robin bouts. Then later this month a PVE mode based on Endgame will drop, in which 50 players have a scrap with Thanos and his army.

Naturally, this is all set to culminate with Avengers Doomsday in December, but all of Marvel Studios barring 2018 Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo take spoilers very seriously. But for Rivals to have Doomsday-themed content, it'll need some insider info.

Speaking to FRVR, Marvel Rivals game director Guangyun Chen assured "We are doing everything we can to prevent any leaks for this important event." Unfortunately, this is somewhat undercut by supposed leaks for Marvel Rivals season 11 which pegs Nightcrawler and Dr Doom – both of which are set to play a big role in Doomsday – as the new characters set to be added next season. Not to mention Season 10's Gorr the God Butcher was leaked ahead of time too.

Granted, I don't know that Marvel Rivals' crossover will necessitate too many full-blown spoilers about the upcoming movie, least of all the "surprising ending" Joe Russo is hyping up. I'd be shocked if the film's ending – which features Beast transforming into Frasier Crane in a Dragon Ball Z-like sequence in which he one shots Doom – will be crucial to the new season. But let's hope no leaks happen, just to be safe.

Marvel Rivals hasn't managed to beat Overwatch's stats yet, but Disney boasts it's still "attracted 40 million players worldwide."

Tracks of the Beast in Arc Raiders is a mission that pits you against the enemies introduced in the Frozen Trails update, specifically the sniping, sneaky Skulker and the relentless, armor-plated Bully. Admittedly you don't have to kill either, but you're given good reasons to do so. This quest is given to you after the complete the Exploring Pendola Pass mission, and really marks a moment where you presence in the frozen map becomes all the more deadly and difficult to manage. Still, I can explain how to beat all the objectives and make it through, having done it myself and built this walkthrough around my experiences.

How to complete Tracks of the Beast in Arc Raiders

Here are all the tasks you must complete in one round for the Tracks of the Beast quests in Arc Raiders:

• On Pendola Pass, head to the Northern Tracks
• Find the destroyed station at the end of the tracks
• Ping a Bully
• Ping a Skulker
• (Optional) Destroy 3 Skulkers
• (Optional) Deliver a Skulker Targeter

If you don’t have enough time to complete the last two optional tasks, don’t worry. You can still claim the normal rewards, but it’s nice to gain some bonus rewards if you can find enough Skulkers on the map.

Where to find the Northern Tracks and the destroyed station

Your first step in this lengthy quest is to find the Northern tracks. It’s not an area explicitly mentioned on the Pendola Pass map, but it’s essentially the northern region of the map where you see train tracks. I just so happened to spawn there when completing this quest, so it didn’t take much searching for us to track down the Northern tracks.

Once you make it to the general area, your quest should update to tell you to find the destroyed station at the end of the tracks. It doesn’t literally mean the end of the tracks, which is out of bounds.

Simply walk to Almatera Station in the northwestern region of Pendola Pass. As soon as you reach the station, that quest task should tick off its box.

Bully and Skulker locations

Although you can find the new Bully and Skulker ARC units anywhere on this map, you’ll likely find a lurking Bully roaming near the station. Bullies are easy to hear, as they’re almost the size of a Leaper but more like faster, more aggressive Bastion.

The Arc Raiders Bullies are large ground enemies that’ll easily close the distance if they spot you. Run around the station until you hear loud mechanical sounds of it walking around, then creep up to it to ping it. You don’t even have to destroy or damage it to complete this quest, so now spend the rest of the match trying to find a Skulker.

Skulkers, on the other hand, are much smaller. They’re ground enemies that move around the ground like a Pop with legs, but they’re a lot more aggressive once they take position and begin firing. As it was late in the match, I ended up finding the scrap remains of a Skulker, but that still counted for the quest when I pinged it.

If you decide to take on the optional tasks, the Skulkers lurk more out in the open than you’d think. They just like to crawl low and act elusive before they target you, and they blend in well with the snow. Start by searching all around the train station, then head out into the rest of the map if you’re having no luck.

To easily take them down, wait for their turret to pop out of the center, then shoot at that. It looks like a weak spot, making it easier to take down compared to just shooting its outer shell. Make sure to loot them and take at least one Skulk Targeter from their remains to bring back for the optional task.

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The Home To Roost quest in Arc Raiders takes place on Blue Gate and you'll need a Blue Gate Confiscation Room Key to finish it. Like Exploring Pendola Pass this is a multi-step quest where no one part of it is hard, there's just a lot of it all stacked up to get through. While you're here you can also try to look for the Ruined Homestead for the Outpost project.

How to complete Home To Roost

These are all the tasks you must complete to finish the Home To Roost quest in Arc Raiders:

1. Reach the back of the Blue Gate tunnels
2. Scan any Android at the back of the tunnels
3. Reach the MANTIKOR locker room
4. Search for any clues in the locker room
5. Read the last vehicle’s weighing logs
6. Enter the Confiscation Room
7. Transmit MANTIKOR security’s last recordings to Shani

Let's work through all that in more detail below.

Scan an Android at the back of the Blue Gate tunnels

Head straight for the Traffic Tunnel at the back of the Checkpoint in Blue Gate. Once you’re in the tunnels, head to the very back and avoid or take down any lurking ARC units along the way.

There isn’t one specific spot for this quest; it can be any Android you see at the back of the tunnels. We’ve pointed out just one of the many Androids in the tunnels. Interact with the Android to scan it, then it's time to find the MANTIKOR locker room.

Search for clues in the MANTIKOR locker room

From where you just scanned an Android, turn around and head to the Security Wing section of the tunnels. You’ll eventually come across the large MANTIKOR logo above a locked door. Don’t go in there yet. Instead, go through the passage to the right and up the stairs.

Be careful of any ARC units like the Shredders, which I ran into here. Once you’re up the stairs, turn right, and you should find a door you can breach. Breach the door to the locker room, then interact with the mural on the wall to search for clues.

Read the last vehicle’s weighing logs

To read the last vehicle’s weighing logs, go back down the stairs into the tunnels, and right across from the platform you’re standing on is the vehicle weighing station.

Head over to the side closest to the wall, and interact with the computer to read the logs. With that done, you can finally enter the Confiscation room.

Enter the Confiscation room and transmit the last recordings

The only way to enter the Confiscation room is if you already have a Blue Gate Confiscation Room Key. This is an entirely random drop, and it’s pretty rare to find. You should hope that you already have one, or you’re playing with a friend who has the proper key.

When you have the key, you can unlock the door under the MANTIKOR logo from earlier and enter the Confiscation room. You’ll find the correct box to interact with on top of the shelf in the connected room. Climb on top of the metal shelf and interact with the box to transmit the security recordings.

With that done, you can finally return to Speranza and collect your rewards for completing the Home To Roost quest in Arc Raiders!

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The Exploring Pendola Pass quest in Arc Raiders is designed to introduce players to the map introduced as part of the Frozen Trails update, with a series of minor quests and objectives to complete across the entirety of the map, including destroying Arc enemies, and patching up various broken pieces of machinery dotted through the region.

How to complete Exploring Pendola Pass in Arc Raiders

There are four tasks to complete in the Exploring Pendola Pass quest. Luckily, they don’t all have to be done in one round, or in any order:

1. Destroy 20 ARC enemies
2. Search the control room at the Cielo Sereno Observatory for power
3. Use 1 Wire to patch into the antenna on top of the tallest tower in the Railyard
4. Search 3 containers inside the Commissary Supermarket

Destroying 20 ARC enemies is the easiest of them all, especially since it can be done on any map and generally completed ambiently as you play. The tougher tasks are the three others, so let’s tackle those.

Where to find the Cielo Sereno Observatory control room

The Cielo Sereno Observatory is on the eastern edge of Pendola Pass. Enter the building, then head up the stairs into the middle section of the observatory. There, you should find the control room that looks over the valley below.

You should see a box on the console that allows you to interact with it. Inspect the tech, and you can now move on to the next task.

Patch the antenna on the tallest tower in the Railyard

For this task you’ll not only need one Wire, but a Zipline as well. You can easily find a Wire on the map if you didn’t bring one, but you're obviously better off bringing a Zipline with you.

Head to the eastern side of the Railyard, and climb up the building. There will be a ladder outside that takes you to the building’s roof. Once you’re up, you’ll reach the base of the tallest Railyard tower.

Now, pull out your Zipline and make sure to place it at the very top. Take the Zipline up, then use the one Wire you brought to interact with the antenna and patch it.

It’s time to take care of the fourth and final task of the Exploring Pendola Pass quest.

Search 3 containers in the Commissary Supermarket

This task may be even easier than taking down 20 ARC enemies since all you have to do is loot through containers in the Commissary Supermarket. Make sure you’re inside the building, then open any type of container.

Do this three times, and you’ll have completed not only this task, but the entire quest! Head back to Speranza to claim your reward.

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The Arc Raiders Clean Hands quest has players head out to Pendola Pass to deliver a specific sundial, but aside from the general peril involved in navigating this snowy map, there's also a series of well-hidden objectives that you have to find, including a hidden Nomad Camp underneath the railyard, then ascend a nearby church to calibrate the sundial itself. Fortunately I've gone ahead and found out everything you need to know about the Clean Hands quest, before laying it out in a helpful walkthrough below.

How to complete the Clean Hands quest in Arc Raiders

Added as part of the Frozen Trails update, the Clean Hands quest takes place entirely in Pendola Pass, and can be completed with a single expedition to the surface. It's broken into two main steps:

1. Find the Nomad Camp underneath the Railyard and search for the polluted item there
2. Use the Equatorial Sundial at the church in Old Town

There's obviously more to each of these steps than I'm suggesting there, but each step is clearly laid out in full below for your easy understanding and reference.

Where to find the Nomad Camp underneath the Railyard

Your first step to completing the Clean Hands quest in Arc Raiders is to drop into Pendola Pass and head straight for the Railyard. The quest asks you to find the Nomad Camp underneath the Railyard, which is quite easy to do as soon as you come to the Railyard from the western side. Upon walking through those tunnels, your quest should update.

Next, you must search for the polluted item in the Nomad camp. This item is easy to find; simply walk up onto the platforms and search the bag on the ground beside the green barrels and the container wrapped in a blue tarp.

An Equatorial Sundial will drop after searching the bag, so make sure to pick that up and place it in your safe pocket just in case. Now, you’ll need to head west to the Old Town to bring the Equatorial Sundial to the top of the church.

Where to use the Equatorial Sundial at the church in Old Town

You’ll find the church near the very center of Old Town, and once inside, head to the very back to spot a set of winding stairs. Walk up the stairs until you find a zipline, then take the zipline up to the top of the tower.

From here, you should see an interaction spot that’ll let you hold up your Equatorial Sundial. Hold your interaction until it completes, and that’s all there is to the Clean Hands quest! Just make sure to keep the Equatorial Sundial in your safe pocket since you need to bring it back to Speranza as well.

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Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update wasn't exactly a make-or-break moment for a game that's already a massive commercial success, but it was a big bet by developer Embark Studios, which committed to releasing larger updates after long periods of relative inactivity. Based on early numbers following Frozen Trail's launch, that gamble is paying off.

As we so often have to, we're working off of Steam numbers for a multiplatform game, so we can only approximate trends here. But SteamDB shows a pretty clear spike for Arc Raiders.

As of October 8, the game has seen a 24-hour Steam peak of 131,388 concurrent players, which is the type of excitement Arc Raiders hasn't seen since April. It hasn't been above 100,000 CCU since May, even, and it has spent several months in the 30,000 to 50,000 range as Embark focused on cutting through the noise with one big knife rather than the dozen small razors it rolled out post-launch.

Obviously, Frozen Trail isn't the only driving factor here. I spoke to executive producer Aleksander Grøndal about the concerted push around this launch, and he said the studio does see it almost as a relaunch in some ways. Nominally, it's a 2.0 moment for the game. To roll out the red carpet, Embark has also given players until October 12 to play the game for free, and it's currently on sale for 50% off to boot.

Sales and giveaways consistently push a lot of players toward games, so Frozen Trail has definitely had some help rocketing Arc Raiders up the Steam charts. This turnout doesn't even touch Arc Raiders' surprisingly explosive launch – nor did anyone really expect it to match those absurd numbers – but it's a pretty strong response, especially since this was a Thursday update. Come Friday night and into the weekend, we may see that 24-hour peak climb higher.

In our chat, Grøndal also examined the discourse around Arc Raiders' player count, which has become a mainstay of many discussions for live service games. "Of course, it's not something that you look at and go, 'Oh, that feels great,'" he says. "That's not what I'm saying. But at the same time, you have to stick to your guns a bit when you make a decision. This is what we're going to do, and you have to believe that's the right approach. And, of course, we hope that works out."

I'd also point you to our discussion with Palworld liaison and Pocketpair comms lead John Buckley, who (fairly) argued that many players misinterpret Steam player numbers. These figures can be useful and interesting as an expression of player appetite, but it can also be easy to overrate them.

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail patch notes are full of sentences that players have dreamed of for a year: "You can now open the map while downed."

The big Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update is finally here, dropping a truckload of wintry content on players and, importantly, unloading the biggest patch notes since the start of the game. We're all going to be busy with the new map, skills, guns, gadgets, and Arc for a good while, but the 2.0 Frozen Trail update is full of tiny yet exciting changes, many of which have been requested by players for nearly a full year.

You can read the full patch notes here. I want to focus on some easily missed lines that punch above their weight. Here's an easy crowd pleaser: "Max Stash Size increased by 2 new levels (328 Max without Expedition bonuses)." With tons of new items coming into the game, I wouldn't be surprised if Embark is all but forced to further increase stash size in the future.

This may be a contentious change because it's technically a nerf to a popular strategy, but the Queen and Matriarch have had their loot reallocated once again. "Moved higher tier loot from the armor pieces of the legs to the legs pieces for Queen and Matriarch," developer Embark says.

In other words, you can't just prune leg armor to plunder easy cores any longer. Instead, you'll seemingly have to sever legs entirely or stick around for the kill, which, really, is probably how it always should've worked. Destroying legs at the joint should be more rewarding than simply peeling them, but until now you'd get literally nothing from the leg frame. My inner loot goblin isn't happy, but this just makes sense to me. However, I still think a dead Queen or Matriarch should drop way more loot than a reactor that only one person gets to loot. We'll see how it plays out.

Another point of contention will be the handling of the Anvil hand cannon, which has been pushed to blue rarity as it was "outperforming weapons both within and above its own level of rarity." Once again, this makes sense to me. With an Anvil, a Renegade, and enough ammo, you can kill a machine god.

I'm a bigger fan of the little animations that Embark's added with Frozen Trail. "Added animations to show the player interacting with their map and inventory," the patch notes read. Additionally, there's now a "mouth animation for when players are talking in proximity chat." Other "contextual" character animations include "brushing dust after sliding" and heaving "when running out of breath for a while." Anything that makes my raider feel more like a fallible container of meat struggling in a cyborg apocalypse is welcome.

Here's Embark finally tackling something that always bothered me: "Adjusted how character sounds are occluded by walls and obstacles for more natural audio positioning." My hope is that this will improve Arc Raiders' directional audio, which could get wonky in firefights in some buildings.

The gameplay section of the patch is where the real gold lies. We've got "more contextual Ping information for ARC and various objects." When looting, you can "drop loot to the ground directly from containers." While crawling around, "you can now open the map while downed." If your backpack looks fabulous but has an extremely visible light source, you can now toggle it off to "go full stealth mode."

One of the new movement changes could interact with the updated skill tree, which pushes agility more heavily, in interesting ways: "Added Scrambling. Sprinting at steep slopes will allow you to scramble up them for a short time." Sandwiched between added wall run and mantling maneuvers, this might actually make a noticeable difference.

Embark mentions the dynamic loot zones it's testing in new map Pendola Pass, designed to make scavenging less repetitive match over match by changing loot hotspots. The exciting part here is what executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told me in a recent interview: assuming initial feedback and implementation for dynamic loot zones goes well, "it will be fairly straightforward for us to go back and reapply that to the existing maps as well." Even as a map event, I'd love to see old zones find a little more variety.

Arc Raiders lead says Steam player count discourse doesn't feel great, but Embark "accepted the fact that we would have less players."

Celeste's childhood drawings in Arc Raiders have players hunting through Riven Tides to find their locations. You'll need to head into the hotel complexes to find what you're looking for, but even then narrowing down the exact location isn't easy. Fortunately I've found it ahead and can lead you to it, to minimize the amount of time you have to spend wandering around lost in the woods.

Where to find young Celeste's room in Hotel Panorama Azzurro

The whole objective kicks off with you having to find young Celeste's room in Hotel Panorama Azzurro. That's marked on the map above, and you'll want room 213 specifically. If you take the stairs on the outside of the building, room 213 will be the first one you see when you go inside on the second floor.

Once inside, head to the cabinet by the window to inspect the map, which will add two new objectives: 'find the drawing on the roof of the third Customs House' and 'find the drawing at the Quay'.

Where to find the drawing on the roof of the third Customs House

The third Customs House is marked on the map above - the second building down going north to south of the stack of four. When you get there, head up to the roof and find this metal panel in the corner. There will be a picture you can examine to finish this objective.

Where to find the drawing at the Quay

The Quay is marked on the map above, and is one of the more obscure locations that only shows up when you zoom right in. Head to the point shown and look for two large cable spools.

There's a drawing you can inspect on one of the legs of the spool nearest the sea. Examine that and you're done. All that's left now is to extract and head back to Lance to turn the mission in for your rewards: a Lance's Mixtape backpack charm and three Sterilized Bandages.

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You'll need to find the ruined homestead in Arc Raiders to photograph a farmland house for the Sheltered Retreat Outpost. It's the first step of this new objective and while it's technically super easy, the location isn't a big point of interest and won't even show up unless you zoom right into the map. To save you searching around for it, here's where to go and what to take a picture of. Just remember you'll need to actually take a camera with you in your loadout or you won't be able to actually photograph what you need.

Ruined Homestead location in Arc Raiders

You'll find the ruined homestead on the map above in Arc Raiders. It will be a familiar location if you've ever been looking for fruit at the olive grove, but it's usually the trees that are the focus here as a result. The objective is to 'take a photo of any farmland house' and for me the one with the large hole in ticked off the objective:

I'm assuming other houses in the area will work, but if you're having trouble just use the one shown above as that definitely works.

And that's it for this objective. Do other stuff if you want, like the Home to Roost quest to explore the Blue Gate tunnels while you're here. Otherwise, get out and go back to base. Once home, you can complete this stage for an advanced camera blueprint and move one to the next step, which is gathering some basic building materials.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Celeste's Sizing Thing Up quest in Arc Raiders will have you travelling to Pendola Pass to check out a fallen Emperor and, specifically, his legs. It's the usual fiddly mission work of knowing what you have to do, but tripping over trying to find out exactly where you're meant to do it all. So, avoid too much pain by taking all my pointers for the locations you need to hit and ticking it all off. While you're here it's worth remembering that the Exploring Pendola Pass.

Take a photo of the Emperor's leg

The first part of Sizing Things Up has you taking a 'photo of the Emperor's leg near Old Town, so the first thing you need to do is remember to take a camera with you. The picture above is the angle that worked for me and ticked the objective off, which can be found on the map here:

Once you have the picture, there are two options and it's important to note that if you don't do the optional objective with the probe next, you'll lose it, as completing the other 'Analyse the exposed area' objective will cross out the option to complete the Probe goal. I learned this the hard way because, despite searching for ages for the probe, I never found it and instead accidently found the next objective without realising what would happen.

Analyse the exposed area on the Emperor's Leg near Railroad Junction

To analyse the exposed area on the Emperor's Leg you'll need to find where it touches down near Railroad Junction, as shown on the map above. There's no obvious indication of where to go here, or what to interactive with, so just climb up to this spot on the leg shown below:

You'll get a prompt to analyze the part and complete this part of the quest. It's not the end though as this is triggers more objectives.

Reach the base of the Emperor and search the buried payload

There are two steps to the final part of the mission, both in roughly the same area. Head to the area marked on the map above and you should tick off the 'Reach the Base of the Emperor' objective which will then unlock a new one to 'Search the Buried Payload'. That is this half-buried, elongated box sticking out of some snow and wreckage:

Once you find it, a prompt will appear for you to search it, getting you an ARC Conductive Coupler. Now you just need to extract and get this coupler back to Celeste to claim your reward: three adrenaline shots, an Exodus Technical Handbook, a Bettina assault rifle, 60 heavy ammo, and 5000XP.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Ahead of Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update, a veritable relaunch following several quiet months, developer Embark Studios anticipated a decline in concurrent and daily players and chose to go all-in anyway, even if it meant weathering a few months of Steam CCU discourse.

Speaking with GamesRadar+, Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal examines the conversations around the game's player count, which has unsurprisingly declined after a huge launch. This year, Arc Raiders joined the ever-growing list of games regularly put under the microscope of Steam Charts, which, he says, certainly doesn't feel great even when your game is a proven success.

"Of course, as developers we look at all our numbers and discuss what we want to do, what are the things we can look into, what are some of the challenges we're facing," Grøndal says. "We're constantly doing that. At the same time, when we did the change of the update cadence, we also accepted the fact that we would have less players over a period of time, with the hope that we could reengage those players with more interesting pieces of content like Frozen Trail. So we were kind of aware of it.

"But, of course, it's not something that you look at and go, 'Oh, that feels great.' That's not what I'm saying. But at the same time, you have to stick to your guns a bit when you make a decision. This is what we're going to do, and you have to believe that's the right approach. And, of course, we hope that works out."

With this new update schedule, Embark wants to release a Frozen Trail-sized batch of content roughly every six months. He says the dev team was aware of the "unsustainable" pursuit of infinite, regular content updates. They were too busy working to get any work done.

"We used to work in a way that we had a big test every six months, and we decided what to fix, and we implemented that, and we reevaluated that six months later," Grøndal says. "The team really wanted us to go back to that. They felt like they did a better job. They could spend more time working on improving rather than just completing. So the team is a lot better in terms of what they feel they have achieved, but also overall health is better, so they were pretty happy about that."

Grøndal considers Arc Raiders' position in the live service sea, filled with leviathans that almost nobody can fight. "We always try to think about doing things from the Embark perspective," he says. "I mean, we can't necessarily compete with the amount of stuff that some of the large games out there can [do]. We're just not that large."

But infinite content isn't the point, either. "Rather, what got us here in the first place was the trust in our own instincts and trust in trying to make decisions that make the most sense for the game and for the developers and for our business," he adds. "We got to Arc Raiders in the first place doing that, so we should continue doing what we're good at, and kind of accepting that that will come with some drawbacks. Of course, that's not a perfect solution. I'm not suggesting that. But we have to play to our strengths."

While Frozen Trail does in many ways feel like shipping the game again, Embark now has more experience with maintaining a live game. By better accounting for those demands in its plans, and giving larger updates more room to cook, the studio hopes to keep the servers tidy while still growing the game in meaningful ways.

"There are issues that come up with just being online, and that kind of ate a lot of our capacity," Grøndal notes. "And it needed to. It's not bad. It's more about, the little capacity we had left was supposed to provide meaningful updates, and that wasn't really what we felt we were able to achieve then. So I think we needed more time to just take care of the integrity of the game, and at the same time give ourselves some space to produce the type of content that we really felt like we wanted to produce. And hopefully the players will see that effort in the updates."

Arc Raiders lead says it's good to "take a break and play some other games" if you're out of content, and he's right.

Arc Raiders is entering a new, hopefully healthier era, both for players and developer Embark Studios. Instead of constantly laying on the gas trying to keep up with player demands, Embark has pumped the brakes a bit to prepare one big update – Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail, out tomorrow, October 8 – and go back to the processes that it used to make this hit extraction shooter in the first place.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal says the dev team is feeling better today, months after becoming "super unhappy" in the live service content race, and hopes to give players big chunks of content to chew on through this new update schedule. But we will inevitably run out of content again. When we do, let's remember Grøndal's sage advice: "Take a break and play some other games."

I spoke to Grøndal about what's coming in Frozen Trail and, just as importantly, what's happening around it. Embark has changed considerably after Arc Raiders grew larger than anyone expected, but it's not just been victory after victory. The studio's had to accept a few things. A big one was getting comfortable with the peaks and valleys of a live service player base. Two truths bookend a lot of this fluctuation: players can consume content much faster than devs can produce it, and some live service frustrations are self-inflicted by folks who don't know when it's time to step away for a bit.

How can Embark fight the live service problem and keep players happy? "I think it's a combination of a lot of initiatives," Grøndal begins. "Of course, we want to create systems that keep people entertained over time because that's the bread and butter for our dedicated fans. And we get new players coming in continuously, so we want to make sure it stays interesting and fresh, absolutely."

Grøndal also hits on a point that the Final Fantasy 14 and Diablo 4 dev teams, for example, have done a good job reinforcing. "I think it's perfectly fine that players take a break and play some other games," he says. "If we just look at it from an industry perspective, we spend so much time in these evergreen games now that a lot of new games aren't really getting the chance they should be getting.

"Jumping out, playing some other games, waiting a couple of updates, and coming back to play some Arc Raiders for some time, I think that's perfectly good for the industry as a whole. So I would encourage that type of behavior. And hopefully we can produce interesting content that makes you want to come back and play the game."

This is the exact position I find myself in with Frozen Trail. I put 350 hours into Arc Raiders, perhaps too quickly, and when I felt I'd done everything, I stopped playing, because that's how you maintain a healthy relationship with a live service game. I came back briefly for the new map and a few other things, but I was waiting for something chunky like this. Grøndal says this is how he plays a lot of games, too, like one of this year's biggest early access graduates: Valheim.

"I consume games in that way as a game developer and a gamer myself," he explains. "I played tons of Valheim when it came out, and now I came back and I'm playing 1.0 after, what was it, almost four years when I took a break from it. And I enjoy it. I think it's great. In my opinion, there's so many good games out there, so go out, play some games, come back if you want. I think that's the best way of looking at it. It's best for the industry as well, perhaps – more players spread out a bit. That, I think, will be good for everyone that is making games these days."

Arc Raiders free trial gives you four days of access to the "full" extraction shooter, just in time for its "biggest update since launch."

The Arc Raiders hype may have died down ever-so-slightly since its monumental launch almost a year ago, but it's still reaching tens of thousands of concurrent players on Steam every day, so developer Embark must be doing something right. The studio says its "biggest update since launch," titled Frozen Trail, is launching October 8, and it's celebrating that release with a new free trial running for four days between then and October 12.

On the official Arc Raiders website, Embark says the free trial will be available to all players on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, granting "access to the full ARC Raiders game." That'll give you the chance to see what all the hullabaloo is about in the game's core PvPvE extraction mode, and you'll get to check out Frozen Trail right alongside regular players at launch.

The big highlight of the Frozen Trail update is the new Pendola Pass map, which drops raiders into a snowy, mountainous region of Italy overseen by the shadow of a fallen "Emperor" Arc Robot. The frozen Italian village features an abandoned supermarket and town square with a focus on verticality. Map conditions include a "Flash Freeze" sequence that forces players to seek shelter unexpectedly. Embark says "new players will be able to access Pendola Pass immediately if teamed up with other players who have already unlocked the new map."

The update also includes four new enemies; the Frigate, Bully, Skulker, and Hydra; as well as the new "Stiletto" battle rifle and "Bantam" revolver; the grappling hook, Tether Launcher, and Yank Grenade; and two new instruments, the banjo and harmonica.

That's not all. Frozen Trail also includes a new weapons modification system, a transmog feature for weapons, customizable player bases, skill tree additions, a new handheld camera option, new quests, new trials, and of course, a free and premium battle pass to tie everything together.

Embark promises to get stricter with Arc Raiders bans as cheaters continue to plague the extraction shooter: "No warnings, no second chances"

Arc Raiders devs are cracking down even harder on cheaters with tougher punishments and improved anti-cheat to better deal with what Embark acknowledges is an ongoing situation.

In a lengthy statement posted to Twitter, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal reiterates that Embark takes cheating "incredibly seriously," spending "a lot of time and money in the ongoing fight against unfair play." While the game's anti-cheat team is "continually working" on blocking cheats and making unfair play harder to pull off, the lead acknowledges that Embark hasn't shared much about its efforts, sometimes intentionally so not to give cheaters a heads up on the changes.

"Do know that our silence is not indifference to the issue," Grøndal says. "And today, we're going to give you a better sense of where we’ve made progress and where we’re continuing to invest our efforts."

So, where are things at? Importantly, "Our cheat detection systems are getting considerably stronger month by month," Grøndal begins. "In addition to kernel-level protection from Denuvo and detections from Anybrain, we're using a growing set of in-house models built around machine learning and other data."

These don't function totally autonomously, but the systems will help identify any weird-looking behaviors to detect cheating. Embark is also doing some small-scale testing of Elytra anti-cheat in The Finals right now, which could be incorporated into Arc Raiders in the future, too.

Then, there are the consequences for cheaters who've been caught. As well as continual efforts to make it "harder for repeat offenders to simply create a new account and return to the game," Embark will now be much quicker to bring out the ban hammer. Acknowledging that many fans were critical of the studio's initial decision to give first-time cheaters a second chance, Grøndal now says: "Permanent bans are now standard for all known cheat programs and, as a matter of policy, any account caught using cheats is permanently banned. No warnings, no second chances."

This can go beyond a simple account ban, too. Embark has recently "broadened our use of license restrictions" to stop specific copies of a game being used with a new or different account if one has already been banned on it. "We've tightened our approach to linked accounts as well," Grøndal adds. "If an account has ever been associated with a banned copy of the game, it will also receive a permanent ban."

Embark is also capable of enforcing hardware bans, outright preventing Arc Raiders from running on a system if "we have enough evidence that a single machine is being used for cheating." The studio is currently attempting to "increase the number of systems that we can target with a hardware ban," too, in an effort to prevent repeat offenders using the same systems. "We hope to implement this later in the year, and it should allow us to deploy sanctions to almost all systems caught running cheat software," Grøndal says.

Otherwise, Embark has also been making an effort to prevent players from "queue teaming, where players coordinate to land in the same solo lobby and attack Raiders who queued alone." After splitting up known offenders in matchmaking, Grøndal says that within five days, "we saw 85% fewer players engaging in this behavior. Spoiled raids dropped from around 1 in 50 to 1 in 300, with no meaningful impact to queue times."

Grøndal's conclusion might not be what everyone wants to hear – there's no way that Embark can wipe out cheating completely. But, it can certainly do its best. "Video game cheating is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it will never fully go away," he admits. "What we can do is make cheating as difficult, costly, and short-lived as possible.

"We built ARC Raiders with love and dedication to the craft, and seeing it exploited by cheaters makes us as angry as it makes you. We are making progress, and we're continuing to work to identify cheating more effectively, act on it more quickly, make it harder for repeat offenders to return, and improve the experience for Raiders who are playing fairly."

This all comes ahead of the big Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update on October 8, which Grøndal previously teased feels like a 2.0 for the game.

Arc Raiders will finally let players unlock weapons and items without hunting down blueprints.

Even though it's still in closed beta, Deadlock, the newest shooter from Valve, is still setting records. The shooter just surpassed 228,000 concurrent players, on the back of a massive update focusing on various gameplay elements.

Right off the top, this round of additions, collectively known as City Never Sleeps, brings in no less than six new characters to play as. Among them are Rat King, who's described as "Scrappy, regal, tenacious"; explosives expert Deadman Danny; and my personal favorite, the tea-drinking Baba.

The half-dozen each bring different strategies to the table, which you can use on the rejigged map. There's one central location in Deadlock, a version of New York City, and it's been retooled here to be full of creepy crawlies and other terrors. Just in time for Halloween - I approve.

Meanwhile, there are more objectives now, voting is better, a greater selection of items, and a wealth of other options across various facets of the mysterious, multiplayer release. There's a lot going on here, and the devs addressed the community on their mindset going into this patch.

"After the Old Gods New Blood update, we felt that there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development (like updating older hero artwork)," the team says. "Unlike previous updates where our efforts were more singularly focused on the key parts of that update, this year we've been working on several different things in parallel."

Many of those "several different things are addressed in City Never Sleeps. It's noted that Midboss, Guardians and Walkers are due for changes that just haven't happened yet. "On the other hand, things like hero remodels were in our heads as something we'd get to later, towards the end of early development, after other core aspects of the game were more fleshed out," Valve writes. "That doesn't mean we don't think they are important by any means, just that they are more of a known quantity to us that don't necessarily need to be done earlier than other things."

What the studio is doing is definitely working. Deadlock remains invite-only at present, but if you can get in, it seems worth a look.

Another Steam page is being turned into an algorithm as Valve aims to show "10x more games to customers"

On the face of it, Arc Raiders has enjoyed a dream year for a live-service game. It launched to huge numbers, then maintained the community while developer Embark Studios maintained a cadence of updates and patches to keep things (mostly) steady. As the shooter's first anniversary approaches, leadership is now getting candid about the toll that's taken on the devs.

Aleksander Grøndal, executive producer on Arc Raiders, discusses Embark's general weariness with Game Developer. "Transitioning to live-service is going to be fucking hard," he says.

"Everyone said that to me. I've even said that to other people," he continues. "I was mentally prepared for it to be hard - but I wasn't completely prepared for how hard it was."

Prior to Arc Raiders, Grøndal worked on a number of major releases for EA, including installments of Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront. While these have online elements, they've got substantial offline options too, making them different animals to the fully live-service machine of something like Arc Raiders.

He mentions that the people at Embark have been worn down by having to answer to millions of players on a consistent and ongoing basis. "The team is super tired. We're putting out content as fast as we can but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well," he comments. "I'm proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year, but at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that."

Arc Raiders jumped out of the gate with monthly updates that kept the gameplay fresh, while putting out fires constantly through routine patches. But Embark has since slowed down, aiming for slower but bigger rollouts on new features.

"We didn't have the time," he says. "You also have a lot of the cost of just maintaining the game – implementing bug fixes, exploits, and other constraints. We were constantly overshooting our capacity and so it was hard to plan when there's so much to do."

He candidly adds the "team were super unhappy," for a stretch and that bled into player dissatisfaction too. Having served his time at Electronic Arts, he points toward his experience there as something he wants to avoid for any of his colleagues. "It's super important [to protect people]. I can tell you a personal story. I was burned out," he remembers.

"We'd just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken," he says, later putting a fine point on what he's getting at: "It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance."

Arc Raiders say fine, here's a "limited test" of PvE co-op: "We can't ignore what the data is telling us."

It's finally happening: Arc Raiders is getting a PvE mode – at least temporarily. Today, Embark Studios announced that a "limited test" of PvE-only co-op will begin in October as the devs evaluate the mode's future as a potential permanent addition to the hit extraction shooter.

From October 13 through October 20, Arc Raiders players will have the option to toggle between traditional PvPvE matchmaking or PvE-only matchmaking. The PvE mode will put solos, duos, and trios all in the same matchmaking pool, with "zero player-to-player damage" between any of them. Players will also get slightly less loot in PvE in order to account for the decreased risk.

"This is, at least initially, a limited test," the devs say in their announcement. "When the test ends, the toggle will be removed and matchmaking will return to normal. Your feedback and data will help to shape the future of this system."

While Arc Raiders was originally envisioned as a PvE-only game, it transitioned to the PvPvE extraction shooter we now know well before launch. Still, the devs have regularly flirted with more explicit PvE mechanics. Matchmaking has been tweaked to put the most aggressive players in separate pools. A full PvE mode was previously tested in the Chinese version of the game, too.

In today's announcement, the devs say that 37% of players are focused on friendly co-op, and "this player group has grown consistently since launch." 34% are pure PvP, and 27% enjoy a mix of the two. (The remaining two percent, I guess, are simply a rounding error.) Altogether, just over half of the player base has "expressed an interest in a dedicated PvE option."

"It’s important to mention that this is not a risk-free test," the devs warn. "The first, unlaunched iteration of ARC Raiders was conceived as a PvE game, and we have been hesitant to return to that concept. There is a risk that introducing a PvE matchmaking toggle could reduce some of the tension that the game was built around. At the same time, we have to respect that some players want to enjoy the game in their own way, and we can’t ignore what the data is telling us."

On one level, the game might simply not be much fun without the risk of PvP encounters lingering in the periphery – our staff's biggest Arc Raiders fan argues that PvP is the reason the game works, after all. In the most practical terms, it'll also shift the economy, since players will be more easily able to extract with good loot. It's also possible that queue times will get longer with a split in the playerbase

"It’s possible that this will not work," the devs conclude. "This test is not a promise that there will be a PvE mode in the future, but take this as an indication that we are seriously considering it."

Arc Raiders will finally let players unlock weapons and items without hunting down blueprints.

Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update is adding customizable bases called outposts on October 8, and with them comes a new crafting station called the research bench. On top of customizing weapons for PvP or PvE with new upgrades, this bench is key to the research system that players can use to unlock new items and weapons without needing to find their blueprints.

At long last, players are freed from the curse of RNG blueprints. At a reveal event attended by GamesRadar+, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal confirms that research targets include "a number of blueprints."

"Instead of necessarily having to just chase RNG to get the blueprint you want, there is a system that is called research, where you can find items in the world that contain a number of research points, and using those, you can actually choose which research that you want to have, and that includes a number of blueprints as well," he says.

"Hopefully, that will allow the players to kind of steer and have an alternate method of getting to the blueprints they want, but also, of course, still maintaining some sort of desire to chase luck out in the Rust Belt as well."

It's currently unclear how many blueprints will be available through research or how difficult they will be to unlock. It also sounds like exclusive blueprints – for example, legendary weapons tied to endgame Arc reactors – won't be available for research.

That being said, anything that cuts RNG out of the grind sounds pretty good. There's nothing worse than resetting your character with an Expedition and, even with the new blueprint vault that lets you carry over some items between wipes, struggling to reobtain a gadget, weapon, or attachment blueprint that you really like.

If we're lucky, blueprints for some of the new weapons and items coming in Frozen Trail will also be available for research. Grøndal says the blueprints for the new weapons, an assault rifle and a hip-fire revolver, can be found "throughout the whole game." New gadgets include a grappling hook and two types of rope grenades that can tether, attach, and move enemies or objects.

Everything we know about Arc Raiders Frozen Trail.

The battle pass reaper has come for Arc Raiders. In the Frozen Trail update out October 8, developer Embark's hit extraction shooter will introduce a new "rewards pass" with free and paid tiers of loot.

"The Frozen Trail Reward Pass consists of 60 levels of in-game rewards, and two tracks: the Free Pass, available to all players who own the base game, and the Premium Pass," Embark explains in a press release.

If you complete the full pass and unlock every reward, you'll earn more than enough raider tokens to purchase another pass, assuming the pass price stays fixed. It's currently unclear if or when the pass will expire.

"The Premium Pass can be unlocked via the in-game store for 1,150 Raider Tokens, or via the Frozen Trail Collector Set store bundle, and includes 50 additional rewards, including exclusive Raider cosmetics and 1,150 additional Raider Tokens," Embark adds. "This brings the total of Raider Tokens available for completing the Reward Pass across both Free and Premium Tracks to 1,350."

In other words, if you're an avid player, you should be able to buy the premium pass just by using tokens you've accumulated and, by completing passes, profit tokens in the long run.

The premium rewards pass is also included with Arc Raiders' newest paid DLC, the Frozen Trail collector set, which, Embark says, comes with "exclusive cosmetic items including the Renzo outfit, plus Dragon's Breath Weapon Stencil, Bob Hair Style, as well as 2,400 Raider Tokens."

In a video showcasing Frozen Trail, product director Gerardo Basurto describes reward passes as a "new progression mechanic" and an "evolution of Raider Decks," Arc Raiders' existing reward track.

Basurto says the free tier of the pass "gives you access to all of the basic cosmetics, so you get all of the outfits." The premium tier adds special toggles like outfit color variants, hair styles, backpacks, and new weapon skins called "stencils."

In a press release, Embark shares a little more detail on weapon stencils: "The update introduces a new system for customizing the appearance of weapons, granting distinct aesthetics (weapon stats are unaffected). Weapon Stencils can be acquired in various ways, and once learned and consumed Raiders will have the permanent ability to apply them to any compatible weapon."

Additionally, Embark says the premium pass only contains cosmetic items.

At a virtual preview event attended by GamesRadar+, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains, "The premium path of the reward pass, that is purely cosmetics and things that make you look different. It will be some weapon stencils, it will be new customization toggles for the cosmetics that you get in the free tier, and it will be more premium currency, amongst others. But all of this is just vanity and cosmetics, so no kind of gameplay advantage for those players who decide to upgrade into the premium tier."

Everything we know about Arc Raiders Frozen Trail.

Arc Raiders' big Frozen Trail update, out October 8, includes a new endgame crafting grind called "weapon amplification," and it sounds like a game-changer.

Tied to a new research bench found in your expanded raider outpost, weapon amplification lets you add unique functions and attachments to, for now, 15 different weapons. You can upgrade a Renegade rifle with a scope (!), make the Burletta pistol fully automatic, or build a Rattler rifle that shoots incendiary rounds, for example.

In the absence of an Arc Raiders PvE mode, Embark says one goal with this system is for players to lean into PvP or PvE with their upgrade choices.

In a new Frozen Trail reveal video, Embark explains that amplified weapons are made by splicing Arc tech with gunsmithing. "An amplified weapon is kind of like the fifth quality level, except that it doesn't give you stats inherently, it instead upgrades a branching path for you where you can select different modules that change and amplify the behavior of the weapon in different ways," a developer says.

At a recent virtual preview event, I asked executive producer Aleksander Grøndal if Embark expects weapon amplification to make PvP fights shorter by lowering the time-to-kill. He says amplified weapons aren't meant to be demonstrably stronger, and Embark has been careful not to buff the already top-performing weapons. Instead, the aim is to make more weapons more interesting and give players additional PvP and PvE options for loadouts.

"I expect PvP to be more varied in terms of what's a valuable item or weapon to use," Grøndal explains. "What we see in PvP is that it's dominated by a certain group of weapons, in terms of, that's what lowers the TTK. A lot of the weapon amplification that we're doing isn't necessarily to make the top end of those weapons perform even better at what they're already really good at. Rather, give you other weapons that can perform well, and give you other choices to have in PvP.

"And with the weapon amplification system, there's also choices that you have to make where certain weapons can take one direction or the other," he continues. "Typically, that would mean certain things in terms of how good a weapon would be in PvP versus how useful it will be against Arc, for instance. So we could see more variety in how to play, and that is kind of the goal with the amplification system, not necessarily just adding pure output power to the top-end weapons."

A big question hanging over weapon amplification, which Embark has yet to fully answer, is how the resource grind works. My understanding is that certain items in the world are worth research points, and you spend those back at the research bench to unlock weapon options, among a suite of other new features.

My hope is that amplifying weapons isn't so costly that it feels like it's not worth the effort. If the economy is right, it could add a lot of life and a fun endgame pursuit to Arc Raiders. If nothing else, it should be fun to craft, save, and finally uncork the good stuff for special Arc fights or events.

Everything we know about Arc Raiders Frozen Trail.

The Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update is out now, adding new weapons, a new map, new Arc enemies, and plenty more to reinvigorate the extraction shooter. There's been a rather long gap between Frozen Trail and the last update for Arc Raiders, and that's due to Embark Studios deciding to slow down the rate of content updates for more sustainable development. But Frozen Trail is a big one, serving almost as a 2.0 update for the game. With that, I'll take you through all the new content in the Frozen Trail update for Arc Raiders below.

Everything new in the Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update

A huge amount of content was added to Arc Raiders with the release of Frozen Trail, much of it focused around a new snowy map. He's a quickfire list of all the headline changes and additions, but you'll find more detail further below:

• New Map: Pendola Pass
  • A large, snowy, mountainous map in the shadow of a fallen "Emperor" Arc Robot, with a variety of playstyles, a focus on verticality, and occasionally afflicted by "Flash Freeze" weather conditions that force players to take shelter.
• New Minor Map Condition: Redirection
  • Specific to Pendola Pass, players can call in Harvester payloads from the Collector, prompting both PvE and PvP conflict.
• New Enemies
  • Frigate
  • Bully
  • Skulker
  • Hydra
• New Weapons
  • "Stiletto" Battle Rifle
  • "Bantam" Revolver
• New Gadgets / Tools
  • Grappling Hook
  • Tether Launcher
  • Yank Grenade
• New Instruments
  • Banjo
  • Harmonica
• New Feature: Weapon Amplification
  • A new system wherein players can upgrade weapons further and modify them.
• New Feature: Weapon Stencils
  • Allows players to customize weapon appearance and aesthetic without affecting their stats.
• New Feature: Outposts
  • Customisable player bases and homes that players can craft/acquire items to display in.
• New Feature: Skill Tree update
  • New skills are being added to the Skill Trees, with others being modified or rebalanced.
• New Feature: Camera
  • A handheld camera gadget that players can bring into missions to take photos with.
• New Quests
  • Frozen Trail will add new quests, as well as quests with optional objectives for bonus XP rewards.
• New Trials
  • Trials Season 6 will be kicked off with the Frozen Trail update.
• New "Frozen Trail" Reward / Battle Pass
  • A two track battle pass of in-game rewards, with a free pass that includes all Cosmetics, and a Premium Pass that includes everything.
• Frozen Trail Collector Set DLC
  • A DLC Bundle with new cosmetics will be added to the game on the same day, costing 2400 Raider Tokens.

Map: Pendola Pass

The new Arc Raiders map is a snowy, mountain region specifically based around a giant, dead Emperor Arc walker robot. The map is specifically meant to push a wide range of gameplay styles, with both enclosed spaces for close quarters, open spaces for long-range, and a mention of verticality.

The map also includes its own unique weather condition: Flash Freeze, unpredictable moments of cold which will force players to take refuge indoors (or even in Avalanche Shelters) or else be negatively hit by the cold.

Pendola Pass is also the only map where you can experience the New Minor Map Condition: Redirection, which lets players can call in an Arc Raiders Harvester away from the Queen but, in so doing, draw the attention of both Arc robots and other raiders.

New enemies

The Frozen Trail update comes with four new Arc enemies, though one is less of a traditional enemy and more of an event.

• Frigate: A massive endgame challenge that's not really a traditional enemy as it's a flying carrier vehicle. You can't kill it but can get on top and navigate various hazards to obtain the loot it's carrying.
• Bully: A four-legged walker similar in size to a Leaper but with a turret on top, these squat enemies charge at you in relentless offense.
• Skulker: A small, opportunistic enemy that uses stealth to hide from players and take distant pot shots. It's a fast, stealthy sniper that you need to listen out for as much as anything else.
• Hydra: A floating weapons platform similar in look to a Shredder, the Hydra has three pairs of gun turrets that can all target individual enemies separately, meaning that there's a viable strategy in diverting its attention among groups.

New weapons

Frozen Trail adds two new weapons for players to use, each of which has a clear niche:

• Stiletto: A light ammo battle rifle designed for medium-to-long range, and better for PvE than PvP.
• Bantam: A snub-nosed revolver with a unique fire-from-the-hip animation, designed as an alternative to the Anvil, a popular favourite among the Arc Raiders weapons.

New gadgets and tools

There are four new gadgets and tools in the Frozen Trail update, assuming you include the previously mentioned Camera.

• Grappling Hook: An alternative to the Snap Hook, the grappling hook is a hand-thrown rope and hook that lets you rappel, swing, climb or even tether to enemies and be dragged along behind them.
• Tether Launcher: A device that fires two tethers attached by a wire. When both are fired, they pull together, allowing you to drag enemies or other players around.
• Yank Grenade: A thrown version of the Tether Launcher, that fires a wire at the nearest character from where it detonates and pulls them towards it. Can be used to smash Arc enemies or pull players out of cover.

Outposts

Outposts are a new form of progression in Arc Raiders for the Frozen Trail update, where players will be given a new base that they can customize, including crafting furniture and cosmetics from items found on missions.

Weapon Amplification

Frozen Trail adds a new system for upgrading guns called "Weapon Amplification", in which players will get a new workbench for their base where they can research upgrades for certain guns, then build those upgrades with materials found on missions.

These are different to weapon mods or levelling up guns in that these are more about converting weapons with substantial changes rather than general stat improvements.Not every weapon in the game will immediately be viable for Amplification: when the update is released, only 15 of them will compatible with this new feature but there will be plenty of Amplifications to choose from. For example, You can make the Burletta pistol burst fire, give the Il Toro shotgun slug rounds, and give the Anvil hand cannon explosive X-Rounds.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail is the biggest update yet and a "2.0" milestone for the game, developer Embark Studios says.

Embark buries the lede in a press release covering today's Frozen Trail reveal. "ARC Raiders’ Frozen Trail 2.0 update will be available on October 8," it reads.

Arc Raiders only just released update 1.47.0. The jump to 2.0 is significant, marking a new era for the game with implications of a soft relaunch. Many players were hoping for a major shift after several quiet months saw the game slow and deflate after an enormous launch last year.

There's a lot in Frozen Trail: a big new map, four new Arcs, two new guns, 15 weapons updated with wild customization options, an Outpost base to decorate, skill tree changes, and quite a bit more.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal discussed the scope of the update and Embark's plans for the future at a preview event attended by GamesRadar+.

"We're finalizing the update, I think the team is kind of sitting here working on that today," he says. "We have the end of polish today, which means that most of the things needs to be done today, so I think they're a bit stressed out. Things are looking good, though, and I think if you take a look at where we were when we did the monthly updates and where we are today, we feel a lot better about what we're putting out and what quality we're putting into the updates. I think the team feels good about that.

"Of course, it's scary every time we do a big update. To me, the best way to describe it is that it almost feels like we're shipping the game again because I kind of get flashbacks to last year when we were in this very same position trying to make the game complete. So it becomes almost scarier in a way because the updates are larger and more complicated to execute. But overall I think the team is pretty happy and excited to share what we've been working on for, basically, since May of this year, and I'm also excited."

Under Arc Raiders' new update cadence, we're now looking at roughly one Frozen Trail-sized update every six months. "That is approximately what we're targeting," Grøndal affirms. "We haven't really set the dates for our next update yet, but we have planned it out, and we are starting the work on that.

"I think we want to keep that to roughly about the same as we said. That's the plan so far, and hopefully we can take great learnings from looking at how the reception is with Frozen Trail, and also include some learnings there [for] the next update. So we are feeling good about it."

By the time StarCraft launches in 2030, it will have been nearly 15 years since developer Blizzard released a new game in the long-running science fiction series – so it deserves a big welcome rather than a small splash as an Xbox exclusive. Thankfully, Blizzard just confirmed it won't be.

Before Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in a historic 2023 deal, StarCraft was mostly a computer man's game, anyway. From the first StarCraft in 1998, to the franchise's most recent installment, StarCraft: Remastered in 2017, games in the series mostly rocketed between Windows and Mac OS. There was that one, short trip to planet Nintendo with StarCraft 64 in 2000, but StarCraft is historically loyal to the noble mouse and keyboard. This seemingly won't change now that Blizzard's under Xbox's jurisdiction, though the publisher refuses to give precise details as to what platforms StarCraft will appear on.

Instead, a Blizzard spokesperson simply told Kotaku in a new report that they "can only say for now that StarCraft won't be exclusive." After being pressed on the issue, Blizzard continues to say that referring to the shooter as an "Xbox-exclusive" would be incorrect.

While this is potentially great news for historic StarCraft computer gamers, it might disappoint Xbox fans – if there are any left. Some people seem to have convinced themselves that StarCraft will not only be exclusive, but also limited to the upcoming, next-gen console Xbox Project Helix. But this outcome was always unlikely.

Xbox has a fair-weather friendship with exclusivity. After its Activision Blizzard merger, games were flying all over the place – Call of Duty left PlayStation to appear on all consoles, and things that should have been Xbox blockbusters like Starfield ended up on PlayStation, too... and they weren't blockbusters.

But Xbox recovered. It started showing off its renewed interest in exclusivity this summer. At the time, chief strategy officer Matthew Ball told GamesRadar+, CEO "Asha [Sharma] believes that to build a platform, you must have exclusive services and software – in this case, games. And so to return our platform to consistent growth, we need a reliable pipeline of exclusive games."

Strangely, this exclusive games "pipeline" apparently does not include StarCraft, despite the franchise's huge popularity. But only Blizzard knows why.

Blizzard's new StarCraft shooter is "not a seasonal game," says lead: "The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end,"

Sacrifices must be made in the name of democracy – but occasionally even Super Earth must admit to carelessness. A DSS buff in Helldivers 2 that was causing more friendly fire than it's worth has been turned off for the time-being, allowing developer Arrowhead Game Studios to give it a good old rework.

The announcement was made on social media, in typical fashion. "Attention, Helldivers," starts the post. "High Command has made the decision to deactivate the DSS Eagle Storm due to an unquantifiable situation with serious impacts on resource budgets for the next financial quarter."

You can literally see the proposal get rubber stamped and all, just to make it formal. This has been a long time coming for the DSS Eagle Storm, since it has a habit of taking out those who call it in.

The Eagle Storm targets enemies on the map and fires explosives at them through multiple runs in the air. It's a tactic that involves the whole map, and runs for the entirety of your mission. That may sound handy, except when it torches you and your teammates in the process because the targeting is indiscriminate and the bombs are hefty.

You can find complaints about the Eagle Storm going back to June last year, with players noting any time they rolled it out, their own fiery death would arrive soon after. One commenter on Reddit mentions they've had missions where their only deaths were self-inflicted because of this cursed bit of tactical pyrotechnics.

Going by immediate responses, the community would prefer changes rather than losing it entirely, and I'd concur. It's a good idea – and incredibly useful, in the right circumstances – but how it manifests could use a bit of fine-tuning.

There's palpable relief in the meantime. "My god they finally did it," one player writes.

While you're here, be sure to check out our guide to everything in the Helldivers 2 Ironclad Democracy Warbond.

The Helldivers 2 Ironclad Democracy Warbond is here, and it sees Super Earth providing its most expendab- elite soldiers with even more explosive gear. Choose to spend your hard-earned Super Credits on this Warbond and you can unlock a comparatively huge selection of gear with your Medals, including five loadout weapons, two armor sets, and two Boosters.

The weapons in this Warbond include some Helldivers 2 firsts, like an assault rifle with an underbarrrel shotgun and a primary weapon grenade launcher, so there's fresh discoveries to be made. Here's everything you need to know about the Ironclad Democracy Warbond, and whether it's any good.

Is the Helldivers 2 Ironclad Democracy Warbond worth it?

Since the Warbond has only just released at the time of writing, I've not had time to properly test everything but will update this guide accordingly. There's also the new Ironclad Democracy Superstore set too, which includes a medium armor set and the Sai energy weapon! With such a wide mix of items, there's bound to be something for everyone and it might just be up there in A or S-Tier as one of the best Helldivers 2 Warbonds to own.

All Helldivers 2 Ironclad Democracy Warbond gear

Ironclad Democracy is available now, releasing in the Superstore on September 22, 2026. You can buy it for the usual 1,000 Helldivers 2 Super Credits or one Helldivers 2 Warbond Token if you have one.

It's one of the most packed Warbonds available, with 23 items to unlock. That also means unlocking everything will require you to extensively prove your bravery as you'll be spending a lot of Helldivers 2 Medals, but they'll get you a solid selection of destructive tools and two Helldivers 2 Boosters. Here's a breakdown of every item in the Warbond and its Medal cost:

• PAGE 1
  • Weapons:
    • AR-11 Arbitrator (35 Medals): A rapid-fire assault rifle with a small-capacity underbarrel shotgun, letting you switch between two firing modes
    • G-8 Immolation (35 Medals): A Molotov-style firebomb grenade that carpets an area in fire.
  • Armor:
    • BFM-16 Tanker armor (45 Medals): Light armor equipped with the Blunt-Force Mitigation passive which provides a higher armor rating, makes you more resistant to being knocked over, and reduces damage taken from impacts and collisions by 30%.
    • BFM-16 Tanker helmet (30 Medals)
  • Cosmetics:
    • Standard of Rapid Evacuation Cape (8 Medals)
    • Standard of Rapid Evacuation Player Card (2 Medals)
    • Verdant Camouflage Tank Pattern (20 Medals)
  • 100 Super Credits (7 Medals)
• TOTAL PAGE COST = 182 Medals

• PAGE 2 (Spend 135 Medals to unlock)
  • Weapons:
    • P-34 Breacher (50 Medals): A missile pistol that fires a sticky incendiary payload – it's essentially a thermite pistol!
  • Armor:
    • BFM-220 Ironclad armor (55 Medals): Heavy armor equipped with the Blunt-Force Mitigation passive, providing a higher armor rating, increased resistance to being knocked over, and reduced damage taken from impacts and collisions by 30%.
    • BFM-220 Ironclad helmet (45 Medals)
  • Boosters:
    • Surplus EAT Allocation (55 Medals): Provides two uses of the Expendable Anti-Tank support weapon Stratagem in your current mission. With two rocket launchers per Hellpod, that works out as one launcher per player in a full team of four.
  • Cosmetics:
    • Shroud of the Juggernaut Cape (25 Medals)
    • Shroud of the Juggernaut Player Card (7 Medals)
    • Glacial Polymer Tank Pattern (50 Medals)
  • 100 Super Credits (12 Medals)
• TOTAL PAGE COST = 299 Medals

• PAGE 3 (Spend 225 Medals to unlock)
  • Weapons:
    • GL-15 Evictor (65 Medals): Explosive power in the form of a primary weapon grenade launcher with a single-round reload and pump action.
    • G-60 Anti-Tank Seeker (65 Medals): Exactly what it says, an anti-tank grenade that can seek towards enemies. After deploying, it hovers near you before flying to a nearby target.
  • Boosters:
    • Integrated Extinguishers (65 Medals): Reduces the time to extinguish flames if you catch fire. Handy if your team is going all in on incendiary weapons and explosives.
  • Cosmetics:
    • Helmet Durability Check Emote (20 Medals)
    • Treadhead Player Title (20 Medals)
    • Executive Onyx Tank Pattern (55 Medals)
  • 100 Super Credits (32 Medals)
• TOTAL PAGE COST = 322 Medals
• TOTAL COST OF ALL REWARDS = 803 Medals

Helldivers 2 Ironclad Democracy Superstore gear

As well as the Warbond itself, there's also a set of Ironclad Democracy gear in the Superstore. You don't need to own the Warbond to get any of it, but you will need almost 1,000 Super Credits to buy all of it:

• LAS-12 Sai (400 SC): A one-handed, SMG-like energy weapon.
• BFM-77 Reformer armor (250 SC): Medium armor equipped with the Blunt-Force Mitigation passive.
• BFM-77 Reformer helmet (125 SC)
• Tread of Liberty Cape (100 SC)
• Tread of Liberty Player Card (35 SC)

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Arc Raiders Expeditions have been paused until early 2027 to create added fix-it time for developer Embark Studios, which now suggests the game's soft-wipe system may be redone altogether.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal spoke to PCGamesN at Gamescom, commenting on the decision to put Expeditions on hiatus right as Arc Raiders rolled out a patch addressing a longstanding complaint about the system.

"Was the system perfect? No, probably not," Grøndal says. "We want to make some significant changes to the Expedition system. But I think right now we're focused on, 'Yeah, they are what they are,' but the intent is to have them change."

Embark has adjusted Expeditions in some shape or other with every major Caravan window, but the needle hasn't really moved since launch. This time, it seems the devs are properly going back to the drawing board, and that may seemingly include doing away with Expeditions as we know them altogether.

"Maybe we'll scrap the whole system altogether. That is on the table, too," Grøndal adds. "Right now, the team is trying to figure out what the next steps for Expeditions are."

Expeditions represent one of the biggest and most casual-friendly differences between Arc Raiders and more hardcore extraction shooters. As a wipe mechanic, Expeditions are totally optional and positioned as an endgame prestige pursuit rather than an economy balancer. So far, the problem has been making Expeditions rewarding and fun enough to pursue, with a fairly small portion of the player base actually participating in the system.

For now, Embark has all hands on deck for Frozen Trail, the big, wintry update set for October 8. This, too, has been described as a moment for the devs to pause and deliver larger changes after a period of minor seasonal adjustments. Expeditions won't resume until months after Frozen Trail at the earliest, but we may get some inkling of what Embark has in store this fall.

Arc Raiders still has a cheating problem because cheats are an $8 billion industry and "we'd need thousands of developers" to counter it, says Embark engineer.

Hark, there's a new StarCraft game coming. This one isn't a real-time strategy game though - it's an FPS. The project was announced during BlizzCon, with Far Cry veteran Dan Hay at the helm, and he's explained a little more about its structure in interviews afterward.

Speaking to Inven Global, he mentions that it's not going to be a particular kind of experience. "If I were to describe the overall structure we currently envision, it's a 'box product,'" he explains.

"It is a narrative-driven open-world shooter where players create a character, name them, and follow that character's story," he continues. "The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end."

This sounds like it won't be live-service, or any such elements will be minimal, and I'm glad if that's the case. It seems like Blizzard is going for a Far Cry-type release set in the StarCraft universe, and that sounds appealing as is without trying to add more bells and whistles.

Hay does warn things could change in the coming months and years. "You can roam around and explore a rich open world, but our story has a definitive ending," he says. "Think of it as purchasing a standalone boxed game, playing it, and experiencing its story. We hope players enjoy it, love it, and return to us later. At the very least, what we are building right now is not a seasonal game."

A structure similar to the Borderlands games seems like a safe middle-ground here, if there's a desire to go down that route. The reveal trailer leans heavily into Helldivers 2 territory, but it seems like it won't be fully online the way that game is.

Hay, who's the general manager and creative director on StarCraft – yes, this is just called that – was part of senior leadership on Far Cry 3, 4, 5, and 6, giving him quite a bit of insight into what works when it comes to blockbuster shooters. He's worked on a couple of Diablo 4 expansions while at Blizzard so far, compounding his knowledge.

We'll see what emerges, but for now, I'm cautiously optimistic.

After announcing StarCraft and Diablo 5 years in advance, Blizzard president promises "to ship, and ship big, and ship on time."

Blizzard Entertainment just revealed a brand new StarCraft game. It isn't a sequel to 2010's StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, nor is it a real-time strategy game – this is a story-driven shooter set in an open world, taking place some 70 years after the StarCraft 2 campaign.

StarCraft was revealed at BlizzCon 2026 with an exceptionally pretty cinematic trailer. We've pulled everything you need to know about the new game into one place, including the first cinematic and screenshots. So keep on reading to get yourself up to speed on this impressive, long-awaited new instalment to the StarCraft universe.

StarCraft release date and platforms remain undefined

Blizzard Entertainment has announced that the next iteration of the StarCraft franchise is going to launch in 2030. The studio stopped short of announcing any further details about the StarCraft release date, nor did it confirm any platforms. At this stage, expect that StarCraft will come to PC and Xbox at the very least, although it's unclear if it will come to PlayStation – the Xbox Reset has introduced a return to console exclusivity, so we'll have to wait for more detail on this one.

StarCraft reveal trailer

The return of StarCraft made its debut at BlizzCon 2026. The cinematic trailer didn't display any gameplay, but it was a good mood piece that was designed to give you a feel for the world and story. Naturally, StarCraft was given a stunning cinematic trailer reveal, which you'll find embedded above.

StarCraft screenshots

Along with the StarCraft reveal trailer, Blizzard Entertainment also released a small handful of screenshots pulled from the cinematic. You'll find those in the gallery above, so feel free to swipe through them all if you want to get a better feel for the gritty StarCraft aesthetic.

StarCraft gameplay

There's a lot we still need to learn about the new StarCraft game. Here's what we can tell you about it so far: StarCraft is a brand-new, AAA game set in the wider StarCraft universe. It's not a real-time strategy title – the genre the series is known for playing in – but is rather an open-world experience. Specifically, it's a story-driven, open-world shooter, with production led by Dan Hay (creative director of Far Cry 5).

StarCraft story and setting

StarCraft is a sci-fi shooter that's set decades after the events of StarCraft 2. Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed that the game will take place in a "living universe" – specifically, it'll be set in the Koprulu Sector, some 70 years after StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void. The Koprulu Sector is probably better known as a sector colonized by the Terran and Protoss factions, situated on the galactic fringe of the Milky Way.

The StarCraft reveal trailer suggests that we'll be joining up to battle a resurgent Swarm, and that the battles will be particularly brutal for the Dominion faction fighting to reclaim a foothold in the Koprulu Sector. Blizzard promises that we'll learn more in the years to come.

StarCraft development

StarCraft is in development at Blizzard Entertainment. This is the first new StarCraft game in over 15 years, with StarCraft 2 landing way back in 2010. The project is being led by Dan Hay, who previously served as creative director of Far Cry 5 and executive producer of the franchise.

This isn't the first time that Blizzard has tried to bring a third-person shooter in the StarCraft universe to life. Back in 2002, we almost received StarCraft: Ghost, which Blizzard had hoped to help push into the console gaming space, although the game was canceled after multiple failed iterations. It's rumored that another StarCraft shooter, codenamed Ares, was canceled in 2019 so that the publisher could put all of its resources towards Diablo 4 and Overwatch.

The StarCraft development team is packed with Blizzard veterans, including:

• Jeff Chamberlain – Creative Director, Story and Franchise Development
• Steven Chen – VP, Blizzard Animation
• Dan Hay – General Manager and Creative Director
• Paul Lee – Senior Game Producer
• Jens Sjöbergh – Senior Creative Director
• Benjamin Lee – Game Director
• Ben Dai – Senior Cinematic Director
• AnaLee Haertling – Associate Manager, Development Operations
• Jamie Wood – Art Director
• Jeff Guy – Production Director

Discover everything else that was announced at BlizzCon 2026.

Saber Interactive had a breakout hit in the form of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and you can attribute at least part of its success to the fact that it was not made in North America. The company's chief creative officer, Tim Willits, says it's been dramatically scaling down its operations in the region.

In fact, Saber has "no real development in North America any more," as Willits tells GamesIndustry.biz. The company is headquartered in Florida, and a handful of its subsidiaries are based in the US, but the vast majority of its development wings are spread across Europe.

Why the move? Well, it's gosh-darned expensive to make games in North America, where industry salaries are driven up by their placement in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Make a game in countries where salary expectations are substantially lower, and the cost of development goes down dramatically.

"The problem is stuff like this: big North American development studios, they run about $2 million+ in burn rate a month," Willits says. "A month. SnowRunner, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars, costs us $6 million to make. That's literally three months of development time in California. So just run the math on that. If it takes [a big studio] five years to make a game, that's 60 months, that's $120 million just in salaries."

Cheaper game development means that publishers are free to take more risks, too. Back in 2024, Willits lamented that there are AAA projects that can't even break even if they don't sell five million copies. Saber seems more keen on building games for (relatively) smaller niches that might actually appreciate them.

"Sometimes I play these games – I won't mention the game – and I can just see the wasted money," Willits continues in the new interview. "I can see dollars falling out of the monitor. But I can tell you that the development cost for [Warhammer 40,000] Space Marine 2 was a third of a major game that just released not too many months ago from a big North American studio. It was a third, and it sold 11 million more copies. You don't need to spend $150 million to make a billion."

Unfortunately, Saber's business bets also include a big emphasis on AI, which came to a head when the publisher finally added an AI disclosure to Rideshare Stimulator amid CEO Matt Karch's public feud with a former writer who claims she was replaced by ChatGPT. Karch is further convinced that "Half-Life 2 of AI" will someday come along change everybody's minds about the tech. Me? I'll be happy if we just get more human hands making games like SnowRunner and Space Marine 2.

The Witcher 4 dev is "still predominantly using people" over AI in development, says CEO, but "everybody has to make those judgments on their own."

I hate bugs. Big, small, somewhere in between – anything with more than four legs needs to stay as far away from me as possible. Which is why, sitting down at Gamescom 2026 to learn more about developer Behaviour Interactive's then-nameless new co-op shooter, I very nearly asked to leave.

Heartbreakingly, Exterminauts is not Dead by Daylight with guns. It's a PvE shooter that riffs off the likes of Helldivers 2 with obvious aplomb, down to the hammy, tongue-in-cheek pseudo patriotism. Punching in with your fellow blue collar employees at an extraplanetary pest control company, your mission is simple: wipe out hordes of creepy crawlies across the galaxy and make it home in time for supper.

I'll be honest: nothing about Exterminauts' premise excites me from the off. But forty minutes hands-on is all it took to change my mind about a genre I've long avoided, and guess who got the highest score of the session? Me.

Another day at the office

It goes without saying that, as someone who has never played a millisecond of Helldivers 2, I thought I was in for a rough hour playing Exterminauts. From shrill voice comms barked between teammates to center-screen aiming in the vein of the best hero shooters, I think back to my time with Marvel Rivals and shudder.

I take my seat and opt for the healer character, whose special ability is to spawn first aid drones out on the battlefield. I don't pay much attention to my actual loadout, but every character seems to have a basic weapon and a huge heavy weapon with unique elemental affinities. Charging up my heavy attack and releasing it after a few seconds unleashes a huge icy explosion, freezing any space bug or winged denizen unlucky enough to have crash-landed into the blast zone at the wrong moment.

Happily, the bugs in Exterminauts don't resemble actual bugs as I know them (Grounded should learn a lesson here). They more closely resemble ugly monster beasties than giant space ants or scuttling roaches, which is a huge relief as someone who thought she'd be throwing her headset down and screaming for the nearest exit post haste.

I spend most of my time in Exterminauts blasting bugs out of the sky while my teammates set about doing the actual tasks at hand. We need to head over to various abandoned space bases across this wild planet, itself consisting largely of red dirt plains with vivid patches of alien flora and fauna, to complete a series of mini-missions indicated by a directional ping on the HUD.

Again, I can't speak too much to what those look like — push a few buttons on a rusty control panel here, leap up a giant metal structure to turn a valve over there — but they aren't exciting enough to pull me away from peppering all creatures in sight with bullets, grenades, and frosty ice blasts aplenty.

Power attacks are replenished using bug goo drawn from the baddies I slay, and re-stocking ammo is as easy as finding stockpiles dotted across the map. I learn quickly that being teammates doesn't imply chivalric duty – my sneaky fellow employees frequently leave nothing for me after beating me to the chase – so I make sure to snag all the bullets and grenades I can carry when I reach a stash first.

This doesn't stop me coming out on top as the Employee of the Shift, with the most kills and fewest deaths. Not to brag, but I don't think I died at all.

Project management

Exterminauts' goofy premise and relatively low-pressure, low-stakes fun means I finally get the Helldivers 2 hype.

That said, I have my concerns about Behaviour's latest as it stands – the worlds themselves are gorgeously vibrant and playful, and I adore the art design there, but knowing that character barks were made with generative AI sours me on the creative vision. I'm told Behaviour will replace them with human voices at launch, but what's wrong with putting a dev behind a microphone for the time being?

Despite that singular gripe, though, Exterminauts has colored me impressed as well as in shades of bug gore. This is my first time playing a PvE shooter of its ilk, but after leaning into its comedy and embracing the twitchy gunplay in a fantastical sci-fi world, it might not be the last.

I've finally fallen in love with Helldivers 2, thanks to Super Earth's immaculate Halo 3: ODST vibes

Gorr the God Butcher is officially coming to Marvel Rivals, and although we have the announcement, the wind was taken out of its sails thanks to a flub by the PlayStation Store. Key art for Season 10 managed to slip onto Sony's platform a little earlier than expected, giving us a tease of what was coming before today's unveiling

Players browsing the store noticed some changed imagery yesterday, September 7. Among various new releases, you could see the Marvel-based hero shooter being advertised with the incoming tenth season, and a particularly gruesome looking character standing tall to boot.

No proper details were meant to be available, making this a clear mistake. Marvel has since released the trailer for the multiplayer skirmish's next season, featuring voice-over from Gorr, who fits the subtitle of 'Butcher's Blasphemy' extremely well – the season set to begin on September 11.

If his gnarly sword and the fact he's holding another incapacitated enemy in his other hand didn't give it away, he's a generally bad dude. One of the worst, in fact, and he's a contemporary enemy of Thor, since Gorr tends to like his gods butchered rather than alive.

You might not think you know him, but you do if you follow the MCU at all – Christian Bale portrays the character in Thor: Love and Thunder. If you've watched that movie, you may remember his goal is complete deicide – the death of all gods. I mean, it's in the name, but he gets pretty close thanks to his symbiotic relationship with his blade, the Necrosword, a weapon capable of actually hurting deities.

He's bad news, and his presence tends to be stressful for pretty anyone who stands in his way. Expect this season to be bloody.

Marvel Rivals hasn't managed to beat Overwatch's stats yet, but Disney boasts it's still "attracted 40 million players worldwide."

August's GamesRadar Replay winners feature a perfectly timed disaster in Call of Duty multiplayer, and an alligator in Red Dead Redemption 2 that took a look at physics and said 'nah'. Both win a $/£250 Amazon Voucher for capturing the moment, and it could be you next time!

Replay is all about you sending us your most impressive clips every month for the chance to win one of two $/£250 Amazon voucher prizes. It can be funny, amazing, weird - the only real rule is it's got to make people stop and say 'what?!'

The two prizes are split between one for the best clip overall from any game, and one for the best Theme of the Month clip, and that theme for September is "Speed". We share all the best clips on the site and across our socials channels - so if you want the world to see your achievements, accidents or discoveries, let us know! (You can have a credit to wherever you want, or stay anonymous.)

If you want a chance of winning the September prize then submit your clips via the big orange button below. You can send in anything from gameplay or a stream - a funny moment, an amazing clip, a weird bug, or just some good chat.

Remember, there are two $/£250 Amazon Vouchers to be won - one for the best video overall, and another for our speed Theme of the Month.

By submitting your clip, you agree to the Terms and Conditions.

If you need a helping hand, here's how to record gameplay on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Switch/Switch 2 to save your highlights

The August Winners!

This month's overall Replay winner is this beautifully timed Call of Duty killstreak accident during a pep talk.

We've rarely seen more perfect comedic timing and context is everything here as... well, you can see.

And for our August Theme, which was animals, this physics-defying alligator takes the prize. There so much to unpack here: the graceful flight, the escape, the fact it was all an elaborate distraction John never saw coming.

If you want to see what the Replay community has contributed already, then take a look below:

These Mech Arena codes help with the most important part of the game - your Mechs. Whether it's cosmetic skins or powerful weapon upgrades, you want to make sure your Mechs are looking and acting the part, and for that you need Credits, A-Coins, and Crates.

Luckily, that's exactly what you'll get by redeeming the latest Mech Arena codes, which I've listed below. Just remember that you can't redeem too many codes in one day, so you'll have to keep checking back to claim them all.

All Mech Arena codes

These are the current Mech Arena codes available right now:

• IMBACKBABY - 1x Prodigy Crate, 200x A-Coins, 1x Rank 3 Blockthorn
• SPOOKYSHOT - 5x Epic Skins
• MIDRUSHGAME - 100k Credits, 1x Gold Crate, 1x Amateur Crate, 1x Prodigy Crate

As you can see from the list above, there are a variety of rewards available with these Mech Arena codes, but mostly you'll be looking at a combination of A-Coins and Credits.

How to redeem Mech Arena codes

To redeem Mech Arena codes, you must have first completed the tutorial. Then you can hit the Inbox button at the top of the screen, indicated by an envelope icon, then the Promo Codes button in the bottom right of the inbox page. Here, enter a code as it appears above and hit Confirm.

Expired Mecha Arena codes

• MECHTOBERFEST26 - Rewards
• ENERGIZED - Rewards
• 2GTLOADOUT - 200x A-Coins, 50k Credits, 5x Fortune Keys, 1k Implant Parts, 500x Basic Mod Parts
• ENERGIZED - 1x Bouncecritter 8
• HAPPY17PLARIUM - 170x A-Coins, 17k Credits, 17x Crates
• GRASSHOPPER - 1x Rank 3 Mech Lacewing, 200x A-Coins, 100k Credits, 1x Prodigy Crate

Mech Arena has been going for some time now, so there have been lots of expired codes to date, including those listed above. Since codes can expire quite quickly, I'll be moving them down to this list as soon as they do to save you time redeeming invalid codes.

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