Well, I could’ve told you half a year ago that this was going to happen eventually. With no content in literal months, cheaters running rampant, and balance apparently revolving around streamers and hardcore players rather than the casual crowd, ARC Raiders has hit mixed reviews for the very first time since launch.
For now, the “mixed” rating on Steam concerns only recent reviews, which are now at 50 percent positive, meaning half of the 3,000 people who’ve left a review on the game in the last month would NOT recommend it.
The reasons? A sense of neglect on Embark’s behalf, combined with a strong lenience toward streamers and hardcore players, whom the more casual folks accuse of “gaming” the system and matching with so-called friendly lobbies with the sole aim of decimating everyone they meet.
“A live-service game with ’10-year support plans’ that sold 20 million copies goes into maintenance mode after just a few months of life? Is this a joke,” one of the top negative reviews reads. The maintenance mode has to do with Embark cutting off monthly updates back in May and deciding it’ll release its next major patch five months after the fact, leaving players to experience the same game state for nearly half a year.
The new patch, now officially titled Frozen Frontier, will add a new map, new enemies, and a new arc, as well as deepen the progression, whatever that means. However, the fact remains: ARC Raiders has had a significant content drought, and that’s only left a sour taste in players’ mouths, though that isn’t the only problem.
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Most of the top negative reviews all complain about a single thing: cheaters. ARC Raiders uses Easy Anti-Cheat alongside a couple of other anti-cheat measures, but these seem to have utterly failed at stopping unsportsmanlike gameplay.
“I loved this game for a while, but it’s so infested with rats and cheaters now that it’s only playable in solo runs half the time,” one review reads.
“Have fun playing with blatant cheaters who don’t even bother to hide the fact because these devs are so incompetent at policing their game,” reads another.
The rats in question, which also form the basis of many other negative reviews, are players who backstab others and pretend to be friendly only to end up killing their supposed ally. This is tied to the complaints mentioned above, i.e., that ARC Raiders caters to a hardcore audience that actively abuses the matchmaking to avoid falling into aggressive lobbies and stay in friendly ones where they can exploit the more relaxed environment.
A lot of problems for a single game, the result of which is a sharp decline in player base, from nearly 500,000 players at its peak to some 30,000 concurrents during its strongest hours. That’s a 90 percent decline, and while that’d be fine for a singleplayer RPG, it’s not looking so good attached to a live-service, perpetually running online multiplayer title.
