ARC Raiders Without PvP: Why Peaceful Raids Divided Players

Imagine an ARC Raiders run with a full backpack and another squad waiting between you and the way out. Would you approach them if you knew they could not shoot you?

For one week in October, Embark Studios let players try raids without player-to-player damage, and the experiment became a point of contention. Some want that option to stay, while others oppose it, leaving the studio with a decision about its future. The choice could reshape the familiar raid for players who want very different things from the game.

I want to examine why peaceful raids divided the ARC Raiders audience, and whether Embark can find a way forward that accommodates both sides.

During the test, players could choose between a regular ARC Raiders raid, where both machines and other players pose a threat, and a PvE version. Under Embark's rules, player-to-player damage was disabled on PvE servers, and stun and fire throwables no longer affected other raiders.

Overall loot value was lower in PvE, and solo players, duos, and trios shared sessions. The mode was unavailable for the Night Raid, Locked Gate, Hidden Bunker, Frigate, and Redirection map conditions. Machines remained dangerous: they could not detect downed players for eight seconds, but could attack them again after that if they moved.

The test did not introduce separate PvE progression or increased difficulty. Embark was examining how the existing game would change without players being able to attack one another.

On October 20, the team reported more than 30 million PvE rounds.

In its October 20 update, Embark said it would begin surveying a representative sample of players on October 22 and expected to share more information in November. The game has returned to standard PvPvE, where both machines and other players pose a threat. There is no decision yet, and Embark isn't promising either to keep the peaceful mode or to remove it for good. Understanding why that choice is so difficult means going back to 2021, to the ARC Raiders that never shipped.

Peaceful raids were the starting point for ARC Raiders, rather than an alien idea grafted onto an established game. Its reveal at The Game Awards 2021 presented a PvE game about players hunting giant machines together, with release planned for 2022. The pitch was immediately understandable: a cooperative action game with steel giants in place of monsters.

Imagine waiting for that game with your friends: one squad, an enormous mechanical enemy, and no stranger waiting to betray you. That was not the game that ultimately arrived. According to Inven Global's account, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund eventually delivered a blunt assessment to the team.

When ARC Raiders was rebuilt as PvPvE, the machines stayed, but other players joined them as a threat. Instead of arriving in 2022, the game launched on October 30, 2025, for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, several years beyond the original plan.

Inven Global describes Söderlund's problem with the old version as the rarity of its enjoyable PvE moments, using the example of one session in 50. The genre suggests a possible explanation: machines follow rules you can eventually learn, while the person on the next hill may do something unexpected. That uncertainty can turn a routine scavenging trip into a story worth telling friends.

The redesign produced a hit, but the people who made it successful turned out to be far less bloodthirsty than a game built around the threat of other players might suggest.

Commercially, the bet on other players paid off. According to Nexon's Q2 2026 results, published on August 13, ARC Raiders had sold more than 16.3 million copies. During the quarter itself, sales grew by 800,000 copies and the game generated ¥18.3 billion in revenue, eXputer reported. Lifetime revenue exceeded ¥88 billion, although revenue is not profit, and Nexon described sales as "normalizing."

Extraction shooters have a reputation for attracting people who want someone else's backpack, but Embark's figures suggest a broader audience. In an April interview, the studio put roughly 30% of players in a mainly PvE group, 30% in PvP and 40% in a mixed group. Half had knocked out fewer than ten raiders, roughly one in five had knocked out nobody — knocking a raider down does not necessarily kill them — and more than 95% of players used proximity voice chat.

Think back to your last raid in a similar game. How often did you shoot first, and how often did you simply try to escape unseen with what you had found? The April figures suggest the second approach was hardly unusual in ARC Raiders, whatever the genre's reputation.

On September 24, Embark published a newer breakdown using different categories. Friendly co-op players accounted for 37%, mixed players for 27% and pure PvP players for 34%. The studio said the friendly group had grown consistently since launch, while the pure PvP group had stayed stable. More than 70% of friendly players and 40% of PvP players wanted fewer hostile encounters, and 51% of the surveyed player base expressed interest in a dedicated PvE option. Embark did not disclose the sample size.

April and September cannot be plotted as one trend because the categories differ, but both point to the same conclusion: a game built around the danger posed by other people also depends on people who rarely shoot anyone. Embark didn't pretend those numbers away for long, and in September it committed to an experiment the studio itself called risky.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal signed the September announcement, and the language was deliberately cautious. The studio was proposing an experiment, not promising a new mode.

Embark named the main risk itself, writing in the same post that a PvE matchmaking toggle could reduce some of the tension the game was built around. The studio also acknowledged that PvE sessions had higher extraction rates and bigger loot. In other words, loot is easier to carry home without other people's bullets, so a peaceful mode could quietly reshape the game's whole economy.

For the test, Embark moved in two directions at once. It lowered PvE loot while slightly raising baseline loot in the normal PvP mode — the kind of arrangement a shrewd merchant would admire: peaceful raiders got a smaller ration, while those who stayed under fire got a week's bonus for their nerve. Embark's own reasoning was economic: players extract more value in peaceful raids, so the higher baseline loot in PvPvE was meant to offset that advantage. The studio may also have wanted to keep its normal servers from emptying out while everyone tried the new thing.

One more detail concerns matchmaking: the rating used to pair players in the normal mode did not change based on PvE play. A week of peaceful scavenging did not move anyone up or down in standard matchmaking, no matter how much scrap they hauled home without firing a shot.

The studio had already seen interest in peaceful content before the test. Design director Virgil Watkins told Pocket Tactics as much.

In the same conversation, Watkins added that "the balance between PvE and PvP is very intentional." Those two statements sum up the studio's position: it sees the demand, but it also built the current balance on purpose. The people who welcomed peaceful raids had their own reasons to support the experiment.

Japanese outlet AUTOMATON, which followed the test, noticed requests to make PvE permanent in the game's Discord feedback channel. On Reddit, as GamesRadar reported, one player wrote that they were having a great time in the peaceful mode — literally "having a blast."

To understand these players, it helps to remember what ARC Raiders offers beyond gunfights. There are enormous machines, a ruined world, scavenging and conversation. It's reasonable to assume that the more than 95% of players who, per the April figures, use proximity voice chat aren't only there to shoot. For a player who came for the world and the machines, meeting another squad doesn't mean excitement — it means risking the whole raid to one lucky shot from around a corner.

Reddit user SirGingo values the option to rebuild supplies in PvE after a risky raid goes wrong. chrisuo07 prefers PvP but welcomes the option to relax in a three-player group.

For standard raids, see the Pendola Pass map guide.

Fear didn't disappear from the PvE mode, it just changed source. Machines could still finish off a downed player, and the loot stayed under threat. A peaceful raider faces a danger you can study and beat with a well-coordinated team, not a person who simply wanted your backpack.

The most awkward argument for PvE's opponents comes from Embark's own September data. More than 70% of friendly players want fewer hostile encounters, but so do 40% of the players Embark classifies as pure PvP. Going by those numbers, this isn't about occasional visitors wandering into the wrong genre — it's a noticeable slice of the audience that keeps the genre alive in the first place.

For supporters of peaceful raids, the test felt like a return to the promise of that first 2021 trailer, where a squad went up against machines, not their neighbors. But that same week had another side, and the harshest words about it came not from theorists, but from people who actually tried the peaceful mode.

Streamer Loochy (@LoochyTV) posted his assessment on October 13, the test's first day, and his verdict was short and harsh.

In the same post, Loochy wrote that the game lacked a PvE endgame — things for players who had already finished and collected everything to do. In his view, the game shines where there's uncertainty, mixed lobbies and unpredictability. That's less a rejection of PvE than an argument that a world without the threat of other players runs dry fast if the game has nothing to offer in its place. To be fair, the test didn't explore new PvE progression at all, so the complaint is really aimed at a future version of the mode.

There were unhappy players on Reddit too, where, as GamesRadar's report put it, one poster compared PvE to a "shop simulator" where "nobody talks." Another anonymous player called the mode "insufferable" because people shoved them off ledges and blocked them from collecting loot. Without guns to use against other people, some of your neighbors found other ways to be a nuisance.

On Reddit, Sea_Bite2082 complains about losing their favorite tension, while Radioman02 proposes separate characters and progression for PvE and PvPvE.

AUTOMATON also describes another odd side of peaceful raids: playing on someone else's effort. Players who hadn't fought would rush in for loot once others beat a tough enemy, and some waited outside locked rooms for someone else to open them. In the normal mode, that behavior could get you shot; in PvE, there's no bullet to answer it with.

This is where the real dividing line runs: supporters of PvE see freedom in the absence of threat, while opponents see the loss of exactly the tension Embark warned about back in September. A peaceful neighbor can turn into a useful partner, but for PvE's opponents they risk being a useless tag-along or an outright nuisance instead. Encounters like that don't look much like the stories people come to this game for.

Both sides are describing something real, and player counts might seem like the obvious tiebreaker. Except in these very weeks, Steam was showing a picture that can't be pinned on one test.

ARC Raiders' rise in player numbers coincided with several events at once. Before the PvE test, the game received the major Frozen Trail (2.0) update, and it was free to try from October 8 to 12. By the start of the test, its Steam peak had reached nearly 186,000 concurrent players — its highest since March. September's peak, for comparison, was around 40,000. The spike was real, but it can't be credited to the peaceful mode alone.

Player numbers fell in the test's final days and after it ended: by October 22, the daily peak was around 85,000, still well above September's high. That decline proves neither that PvE got boring fast nor that removing it scared players off — the free period had already ended, and interest in the update could simply have cooled.

On top of that, a new competitor arrived. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launched on October 23 with DMZ, which Infinity Ward rebuilt as an extraction shooter. Players who digitally preordered the game got early access to the mode on October 20 — the final day of ARC Raiders' PvE test.

Finally, Steam's numbers don't cover PS5 and Xbox Series X/S players at all. Overall player counts can't tell us how many people came specifically for PvE and how many left once it was switched off. Judging the mode properly would need data that separates its effect from the update, the free weekend, and the competition.

Since the numbers stay silent, what's left is the experience of people who already tried to split peace and war inside one extraction shooter. The best-known such experiment cost players $250.

The genre already has a loud precedent, and it shows how PvE can become the source of a scandal. Battlestate Games made Escape from Tarkov's PvE mode exclusive to the $250 Unheard Edition, turning peaceful raids into a privilege of the priciest edition.

There was a certain logic to the decision: want to raid without other people's bullets? Buy the top edition, and peace arrives the moment you pay. The peaceful experience ARC Raiders let people try for a week turned out, in Escape from Tarkov, to be a premium service — and players answered with anger.

The loudest objections came from owners of the previous top edition, Edge of Darkness, which had advertised a season pass covering "all future DLC" — only for the studio to say PvE didn't count. As Hitmarker tells it, Battlestate COO Nikita Buyanov explained that the studio considered DLC to mean major additions to the game.

Battlestate then backed down: as Hitmarker reported on April 29, 2024, COO Nikita Buyanov apologized to players, and the studio promised Edge of Darkness owners access to the mode in waves. The story ended in a reversal, but it began with tying a peaceful mode to the game's most expensive edition.

PvE later became available as its own paid add-on to the base game. Today, you can buy the PVE Zone on Steam too, so the $250 edition is part of the scandal's history rather than a condition for playing peacefully now.

For Embark, these lessons are still theoretical, since it hasn't decided anything about permanent PvE yet. But the reaction to Battlestate's decision shows that a peaceful mode in a game like this can be read not as a minor option, but as a question of whose game it really is. Separate players by price tag or special status, and an argument about playstyle quickly turns into an argument about fairness.

Embark still has to decide whether to keep PvE, and on what terms. The studio has a few options, and each one risks disappointing some part of its audience.

I'd describe this less as "casuals versus hardcore players" and more as a collision between two halves of the same success. A peaceful version without player combat already failed the studio's own internal check once, and the PvP core is held up in part by players who rarely shoot anyone themselves. So whatever Embark eventually decides, there's apparently no free option — these aren't predictions, just the choices that follow from what the studio has already said.

First, a permanent toggle on the test's terms. That answers the 51% who want a dedicated PvE option, and the group Embark says keeps growing. But this path runs into the risk the studio named itself: some of the tension could disappear. If extracting loot stays easier in peaceful sessions, the reduced rewards may have to stay too, and peaceful raiders risk feeling like second-class players.

Second, separate PvE servers with their own, scaled-down economy. That makes it easier to protect the normal mode from extra value flooding in, but it locks the audience split in place for good. It would also have to answer Loochy's complaint about a missing endgame, since a peaceful mode with no goals of its own risks exactly the boredom he described after a few runs.

Third, further tuning of the playstyle-based matchmaking that already exists. Embark explained back in May that the system tries to pair raiders with similar behavior, without guaranteeing an absence of aggressive opponents. The studio could lean harder on those preferences while keeping one shared PvPvE mode. But that risks satisfying neither the players who want guaranteed peace nor the ones who want more frequent fights with other players.

Fourth, go back to the game without a peaceful mode. The tension stays untouched, and so does the balance Watkins called very intentional. But then Embark has to explain to half of its surveyed players why it asked them in the first place — against the backdrop of 30 million peaceful rounds already played.

There's no decision yet, but the main fork in the road is already visible: how to protect peaceful players while keeping the tension of every encounter intact.

ARC Raiders began as a cooperative game about hunting machines. During development, Embark's head decided it wasn't engaging enough, and the studio added the threat of other players. In that form, the game became a hit and sold more than 16.3 million copies. Now, by Embark's own numbers, there are more friendly players than players who prefer pure PvP, and the week-long test produced more than 30 million peaceful rounds.

Unpredictable encounters with other squads helped ARC Raiders find its audience. But part of that audience wants to explore the world and fight machines without risking a bullet from a neighbor. Embark still has to work out how to give those people what they want while keeping the tension everyone else values.

I wouldn't rush to call the test results a win for PvE, or proof that the game doesn't need PvP. Interest in peaceful raids is obvious, but will the mode hold onto players long-term? That depends on whether ARC Raiders has enough challenges and goals worth coming back for, even without the threat of another person attacking you.

Which argument about ARC Raiders' peaceful-raids debate do you think got left out? Tell us in the comments.

The key facts about ARC Raiders PvE, as of November 2026.

Not as of early November. The peaceful mode only ran during the October 13–20, 2026 test, after which the game returned to standard PvPvE. After the test, Embark announced it would gather feedback and analyze the data, expecting to share more in November, but no public decision on permanent PvE has appeared yet.

From October 13 at 11 a.m. to October 20 at 11 a.m. Central European Summer Time, exactly one week.

Embark said more than 30 million PvE rounds were played during the test. That's a round count, not a count of unique players, and the studio did not disclose how many people tried the mode.

There was no damage between players, stun and fire grenades didn't affect anyone else, and overall loot value was lower. The mode wasn't offered for the Night Raid, Locked Gate, Hidden Bunker, Frigate and Redirection map conditions. ARC machines didn't notice a downed player for eight seconds, then could attack again if the player moved.

Yes. It was revealed at The Game Awards 2021 as a cooperative PvE game about hunting giant machines, planned for a 2022 release. According to Inven Global, Embark head Patrick Söderlund told the team the game wasn't fun, and it was rebuilt as PvPvE. It launched on October 30, 2025.

More than 16.3 million copies as of Q2 2026 results. Nexon published this figure on August 13.

According to Steamcharts, ARC Raiders' peak concurrent Steam players in October 2026 reached 185,443, with an average of around 69,163. September's peak, for comparison, was 39,900 players. Steamcharts' all-time record of 465,097 concurrent players was set in January 2026. These figures don't cover the console audience.