Embark Studios has announced that their long-awaited extraction shooter Arc Raiders will release on 30th October.
As was revealed with a gameplay trailer last year, the game tasks players known as Raiders to head out from the human haven of Speranza City and look to explore the surface and the Buried City to find vital resources – each player can have different objectives and goals, gathering loot that you’ll then want to get back out of the level.
Of course, there’s other players out there, and if you come across another Raider you can chat using a quick wheel of dialogue options, potentially trying to share the spoils with someone outside of your party instead of having a gunfight. Any time a Raider is knocked down, a flare goes up to mark their position, though you’ll never be sure if they were in a fight with the ARC robots or ended up in a scuffle with other players.
Coming out across PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, ARC Raiders will be venturing into an increasingly busy genre. The extraction shooter and PvPvE multiplayer has become a popular follow on and counterpart to the battle royale over the past half decade, with the most popular examples including Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown, while there’s both big budget upcoming games like Bungie’s Marathon (which is expected to beat Arc Raiders to release) and scrappier upstarts like Ascendant.
This game has had a fair bit of time in the oven. ARC Raiders was announced back in 2021 at The Game Awards, initially with a 2022 release target, which it then slipped from. Helmed by ex-Battlefield lead Patrick Söderlund, the team explained that they need more time to expand their take on the co-op shooter, seemingly shifting away from pure PvE originally to bake in the PvPvE elements.
It eventually reemerged back during Summer Games Fest with a new 2025 target launch, and has recently gone through rounds of testing, building up to its release later this year.
