ARC Raiders Players Have Found a New Exploit That Gives PC Player an Unfair Advantage

ARC Raiders players on PC have found another way to gain the upper hand over other players, leaving console gamers at a major disadvantage. Released at the end of October by developer and publisher Embark Studios, the PvPvE extraction looter shooter seems to have almost unwavering popularity. ARC Raiders currently has a concurrent player count of over 350,000 on Steam, only 110,000 beneath its all-time peak. But of course it hasn’t been all roses or free from player disgruntlement.

It wasn’t long after release that players found they could reduce their graphics settings to lessen the amount of grass and shrubbery rendered, allowing them to spot other raiders hiding in bushes. Then for a while, PC players found that they could gain an advantage by adjusting their Nvidia filters to increase the game’s brightness, enabling them to unfairly see in the dark. This exploit was stymied when ARC Raiders players found that Nvidia filters had been disabled, though whether this was done by Embark Studios or the graphics card manufacturer was unclear. Now, to the frustration of many, it seems there’s a workaround to this fix that’s being passed around on social media.

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ARC Raiders PC Gamers Have an Unfair Advantage Over Console Players

It turns out that PC users playing ARC Raiders can access the game’s command console, and some have been using it to override the settings that create fog, dust, smoke, shade, and other impairments to vision. Obviously, this gives an unfair advantage to PC players who are willing to use the exploit, and other raiders, on both PC and console, are calling on Embark to act. Many are baffled why the command console was left accessible to players in the first place, while others are confused that people would want to mess with the appearance of ARC Raiders’ immersive environments just to win. One commenter on Reddit, xforce11, summed up the problem succinctly: “Wow, so that’s why people can perfectly snipe my head… even though I threw like four smoke grenades…”

More recently, cheating in ARC Raiders has become a more intrusive problem, and players have found more ways to get it done than pulling down the command console on PC. For a long time after its launch, cheaters weren’t a very common sight compared to other live-service games. Sure, there were a few people using collision exploits to bug their way through locked doors, but that was patched by Embark fairly quickly. Occasionally, a raider would be seen flying inexplicably through the air, but it wasn’t a frequent occurrence. But as the extraction shooter has attracted an audience, so too has it drawn players who want to come out on top at all costs. It’s gotten to the point that some players claim that the issue in ARC Raiders is now worse than that found in Call of Duty, a franchise notorious for its cheating problem.

After a brief holiday break, the dev team at Embark responded by assuring frustrated players that it would be making moves to cull cheaters in ARC Raiders in the coming weeks. The studio will be implementing changes to its rulesets, as well as new detection mechanisms to catch bad actors. For at least the past month, raiders have been exploiting an “out of map” glitch, for example, that allows them to move outside of the game world to camp unsuspecting players. Embark has stated that it is working on a client-side fix specifically for this hack, as well as introducing tools aimed to help content creators combat stream sniping.

Released

October 30, 2025

ESRB

Teen / Violence, Blood