ARC Raiders is switching off player damage for a week to test what remains of its extraction tension

The same extraction structure without hostile Raiders

The PvE toggle will sit alongside standard PvPvE matchmaking. Once enabled, player-to-player damage is reduced to zero while ARC machines remain hostile. Players can still scavenge, explore and complete quests, but another Raider appearing over the next ridge can no longer turn into an immediate firefight.

Solos, duos and trios will share the same PvE sessions. Embark also wants switching between the two experiences to be straightforward, allowing somebody to run a lower-pressure PvE session and then return to PvPvE without joining a separate character ecosystem. Time spent in PvE will not affect the player’s PvPvE matchmaking rating.

That removes more than bullets. In normal ARC Raiders, fighting an ARC unit creates noise, noise reveals information, and information can bring another player into the encounter. A machine fight can therefore become a social negotiation, an ambush or a reason to abandon valuable loot. The October test removes one link from that chain and lets Embark observe what happens next.

Safety comes with cheaper loot

Embark is not keeping every reward rule unchanged. Overall loot value will be lower in PvE to compensate for the reduced risk. Downed players can also be reacquired by ARC enemies if they keep crawling, while remaining still causes those enemies to ignore them. That behavior is another attempt to preserve some pressure when hostile Raiders are no longer part of the equation.

Night Raids, Hidden Bunker, Locked Gate and Frigate will not be available through the PvE test. Embark says those conditions depend heavily on uncertainty around other players and were designed around higher tension. Rather than rebalance them immediately, the studio is leaving them on the PvPvE side.

This is therefore not a finished alternate ruleset. Embark says the test is not about introducing dedicated PvE progression or making the machine encounters harder to replace human opponents. It is testing whether players value the existing scavenging, questing and co-op structure when PvP encounters become optional.

ARC Raiders is briefly circling back toward its original concept

There is an odd bit of history behind the experiment. Embark says ARC Raiders was originally conceived roughly seven years ago as a raid-based PvE co-op game with looting mechanics. That version eventually ran into design problems and was reset, leading to the high-tension PvPvE extraction game that launched in October 2025.

Now the released game is temporarily borrowing one of the defining ideas of the version Embark abandoned. The studio is not undoing the PvPvE redesign; both queues will exist during the test. But the comparison should give Embark unusually clean evidence about how much of the current game’s appeal relies on the possibility of human hostility.

Embark says its players are already pulling the game in that direction

According to Embark’s own player analysis, 37% of its observed population falls into a friendly co-op group, 27% is categorized as mixed and 34% as pure PvP. The studio also says 51% of surveyed players expressed interest in a dedicated PvE option. These are Embark’s own survey and behavioral figures, so they should be read as measurements of the population it analyzed rather than a universal poll of every person who owns the game.

Another number complicates the usual PvE-versus-PvP split. Embark says more than 70% of its friendly group wants fewer hostile encounters, but so do 40% of players categorized as PvP. ARC Raiders has long produced encounters where strangers talk, cooperate or simply agree not to shoot. The toggle effectively turns that negotiated truce into a matchmaking rule.

On October 20, the toggle is supposed to go away

The test begins October 13, five days after the scheduled Frozen Trail update, and ends October 20. Embark says the toggle will then be removed and matchmaking will return to normal while the studio reviews both behavioral data and player feedback.

No permanent PvE mode has been confirmed. Embark also warns that any future version could look substantially different from this beta. For one week, though, ARC Raiders will get to answer a very specific question with live players instead of theory: how much does an extraction game change when the other people in the world are no longer allowed to become the most dangerous thing in it?