The post <i>Arc Raiders</i> Devs Say They Have Big Plans To Stop The Current Wave Of Cheaters appeared first on Kotaku.

Embark has just rolled out patch 1.7.0 for Arc Raiders players everywhere. This is a significant patch for the extraction shooter for a number of reasons, not least of which because it kicks off a series of events under the Cold Snap banner, which introduces a new conditions to the game’s maps.

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Arc Raiders is kicking off its last major event of the year. The Cold Snap update arrives moments from now, and it’s perhaps the game’s biggest since its momentous launch in late October. We’ve known about the existence of Cold Snap for a while, of course, but we finally have a solid idea about what to expect.

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The time has arrived for another Arc Raiders update, and Embark has certainly delivered. Today’s patch, version 1.6.0, is among the smallest the game has received so far, focusing almost exclusively on disabling map exploits.

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Apparently, there are many studios out there that are interested in making a film or TV show based on Embark's shooter, Arc Raiders.

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New games performed really well on Steam last year - notably better than the year before.

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Embark Studios' founder Patrick Soderlund has stated that Arc Raiders, a game initially meant to release as a free-to-play title, launched as a $40 premium price point in part due to Helldivers 2's approach.

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An Arc Raiders player calling for help while playing the game had their door kicked in by a concerned neighbour, who thought their wails were a sign of real-world distress.

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Arc Raiders may have surpassed 12m sales at the start of 2026, according to video game industry analysts.

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If you've found you've been coming up against tougher players in Arc Raiders just recently, that could well be because you've been deemed an "aggressive" player.

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43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.

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Arc Raiders was Steam's biggest-selling game over the holiday period.

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It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.

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2025 has gone by in a flash, hasn't it? Well, apart from the days I've spent tabulating all your Game of the Year votes and presenting the results here - that has felt like an eternity and I think has given me permanent neck pain. But, let's not worry about that. I'm sure you'll agree it was worth the sacrifice.

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First, it was the Rocketeers, now it’s the Bastions that you need to throw Snowballs at for the current Weekly Trial in ARC Raiders!

Thankfully, Bastions are a bit easier to hit with these snowballs. They are larger, slower, and they’re not flying all over the place. But they are also dangerous and threatening, so you need to be careful.

In this guide, we’ll tell you an easy method to complete this weekly trial safely.

The Trial Basics

For the most part, this weekly trial works similarly to the one for Rocketeers before it. We recommend checking out our guide on the Rocketeers trial too, as it tells you the best way to farm a lot of Snowballs in preparation!

Now, the upside here is that Bastions aren’t flying all over the place. So, they’re a lot easier to deal with than Rocketeers. The basics remain the same, though: find and disable a Bastion so that you can dump your loadout of Snowballs into it.

For this trial, the best map is Spaceport during the Cold Snap event. More specifically, you’ll want to go to the Rocket Assembly building on the northeastern part of the map.

Do note, the Cold Snap event isn’t really required to throw Snowballs. However, as the clip above shows, there are 3 snow piles inside the building while the event is on. This allows you to get some more Snowballs, which is quite convenient!

As for your loadout, you want to bring a solid weapon exclusively for damaging the Bastion’s legs. You don’t want too much damage, though, you only need to disable the legs!

We also recommend bringing a solid weapon for PvP, just in case you need to deal with other players. They’re likely to show up as they try this same method or are simply drawn in by the noise. A combination of Venator and Stitcher should work well here.

That aside, we recommend the Looting Mk. 3 (Cautious) Augment. It gives you more inventory space. Don’t bring too much ammo with your loadout either, try to fill your inventory with Snowballs instead.

With those basics down, it’s now time to go over the method itself!

The Method

Now, to complete the trial, you want to first go a bit southwest from the Rocket Assembly building. You can usually find a Bastion around the area. Try to safely get its attention by firing a couple of shots at it.

Once the Bastion is focused on you, start backing up into the Rocket Assembly building and kite the Bastion into it. In there, you want to use the tanks inside the building to hide from the Bastion.

This allows you to easily take shots at the Bastion while remaining relatively safe! At this point, you just need to shoot at its legs to disable it.

After you manage to disable the Bastion’s legs, you just need to start throwing Snowballs at it! That’s all that’s left at this point, just empty your inventory onto it.

Thanks to it being disabled and the tanks inside of the building, you can stay pretty safe while doing this. Plus, you can use the nearby piles of snow to get some extra Snowballs, if the Cold Snap event is active.

So, there you have it! That’s the gist of everything you need to do to complete the “Throw Snowballs at Bastions” Weekly Trial with ease in ARC Raiders. Now that you know the method, you just need to grind it out.

The post ARC Raiders: Throw Snowballs at Bastions Guide Weekly Trial appeared first on Games Fuze.

The new weekly trials for ARC Raiders just dropped, and this one has already annoyed a lot of people: damaging Rocketeers with snowballs. On paper, it sounds goofy. In practice, it can be insanely time-consuming if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I managed to pelt Rocketeers with 177 snowballs as a solo Raider, which landed me a ridiculous 44,250 points in a single run. That’s more than enough to push leaderboard progress and actually make this trial worth the pain. This guide breaks down exactly how I did it, the safest locations, and two different methods depending on whether or not you have Showstoppers.

If you want points, efficiency, and fewer deaths to rockets, this is the way to do it.

How the Snowball Trial Actually Works

This trial only appears during Cold Snap conditions, and while you don’t technically need Cold Snap active to throw snowballs, you absolutely want a 2x modifier like Locked Gate to make the score worthwhile. Rocketeers are tanky, loud, and attract other Raiders, so the whole goal here is to disable one safely and dump as many snowballs into it as humanly possible before someone ruins your fun.

The secret is preparation. This is not something you want to wing in your scoring run.

Snowball Farming Setup (Do This First)

There are two methods for completing this challenge. One uses Showstoppers and is faster but riskier. The other only requires an Anvil or Renegade and a bit of patience. No matter which method you use, the prep work is the same.

You should dedicate one full raid purely to farming snowballs. Farming snowballs is slow, especially if you only have access to a single snow pile. You can farm one snowball every six seconds, which means filling an MK2 loot bag with around 100 snowballs takes roughly ten minutes. Once you factor in freezing and defrosting, you’re realistically looking at about fifteen minutes total.

You can speed this up by running between multiple snow piles if they’re close together, but either way, this part is a grind. That’s why you should never try to farm snowballs in the same raid where you’re going for your high score.

There is a huge quality-of-life trick here too. Snow piles under roof overhangs let you farm without freezing at all. Ruby Residence on Dam Battlegrounds has one of these, and Pale Apartments might as well, though Ruby is the confirmed spot. You can sit there nonstop and fill your inventory without ever needing to defrost, which saves a ton of time.

Once your bag is full, extract, reset, and then go for your scoring run.

Best Map to Do This On

You can technically do this on any Cold Snap map, but avoid Buried City. There are fewer Rocketeers there, and the ones that do spawn are more likely to get blown up by other Raiders before you finish farming points.

Blue Gate is by far the best option. It consistently has three to four Rocketeers flying around, good cover, and Raider hatches close enough to let you leave at the last second. Dam Battlegrounds is also excellent, especially for the safer building method I’ll explain below.

Equipment You’ll Want

If you have Showstoppers, bring more than you think you need. It usually takes multiple throws to properly disable a Rocketeer, and missed throws or partial hits happen more often than you’d expect.

If you don’t have Showstoppers, bring a heavy weapon. The Anvil is ideal, but the Renegade works just fine. Both are strong enough to destroy Rocketeer thrusters without killing the whole unit.

Healing items are mandatory. Even when played safely, you’re probably eating a rocket or two during setup.

Walkthrough: The Showstopper Method

Once you spawn in, head straight to the nearest Rocketeer patrol area and find solid cover. You want a place where you can warm up, break line of sight, and avoid getting rocketed while frozen.

Clear out nearby enemies first, then aggro the Rocketeer. Stay in cover until it gets close, then start throwing Showstoppers. When done correctly, the Rocketeer will flip over, land upside down, and become fully paralyzed on the ground.

This is the ideal state. It can’t take off, it doesn’t reposition, and it’s basically a very angry snowball magnet. Just make sure you stay behind it, because it can still fire rockets from the front side.

Once it’s down, unload your entire inventory of snowballs into it. If you can pelt it while staying in cover, even better, since you won’t need to pause to warm up.

Time matters here. The longer a Rocketeer sits paralyzed, the higher the chance another Raider shows up and destroys it. Don’t be slow. Dump snowballs fast.

After you run dry, farm more snowballs nearby and move on to your second Rocketeer. The village houses on Blue Gate are perfect for this. Rocketeers patrol nearby, and there’s a Raider hatch close enough to extract at the very last second.

Walkthrough: No Showstoppers Required

If you don’t have Showstoppers, the goal is simple but precise. You need to destroy only the two front thrusters on the Rocketeer.

An Anvil will take a couple of cylinders per thruster. A Renegade will take a magazine or two. Once both thrusters are destroyed, the Rocketeer will fall and become paralyzed exactly like it does with Showstoppers.

Be careful not to overdamage it. If the Rocketeer takes too much damage beyond the thrusters, it can explode when it hits the ground, ending your run instantly.

Once it’s down, everything else plays out the same. Get behind or beside it and dump your remaining snowballs. Stay close to a Raider hatch so you can extract at the very end without risking your score.

The safest non-cheese method is using a small building with two exits. Aggro the Rocketeer from far away to get a short damage window, then rotate between exits. Peek, shoot the thruster, duck inside, rotate, repeat. The Rocketeer will fire every time you peek, so patience matters.

Once both thrusters are gone, it’s helpless. You can even finish it with a pickaxe if you really want to.

The Dam Battlegrounds Building Method

On Dam Battlegrounds, there’s a specific building near the swamp that makes this trial absurdly easy. It has a snow pile right next to the entrance, so you can farm five to seven snowballs, run inside, defrost, and repeat without freezing.

Rocketeers almost always patrol the nearby swamp. If you see one in the distance, just shoot it once and it’ll come straight to you. The building also has holes in the roof, which means if the Rocketeer flies overhead, you can pelt it safely from inside.

There’s an extract nearby too, making it incredibly easy to finish the trial and leave immediately. Just be cautious of other Raiders, since this area sees a lot of activity. When I did this, I stayed stealthy and avoided unnecessary fights until the Rocketeer was disabled.

Extra Tips That Matter

To make sure a Rocketeer falls on its back when using Showstoppers, always target the front two thrusters. This massively increases the chance of a clean disable.

This week’s leaderboard is brutal. 300k+ is basically the requirement for 2x promo, and as usual, trios and sweat squads are clogging the top ranks. Honestly, these trials would feel way better with a solos-only leaderboard.

Cold Snap conditions rotate, so you may need to swap maps. The good news is that when Cold Snap hits Dam Battlegrounds or Blue Gate, it often sticks around longer than usual. One of my runs lasted nearly two hours, which gives you plenty of time to set up properly.

Wrap-Up

This trial looks dumb, sounds annoying, and turns out to be one of the best point farms of the week if you approach it correctly. Spend one run farming snowballs, come in prepared, disable Rocketeers safely, and dump everything you’ve got before anyone else shows up.

If you do it right, you’ll watch your score skyrocket as you head back to Speranza, wondering why throwing snowballs at military hardware is somehow peak ARC Raiders gameplay.

If this guide helped you finish the trial or save your sanity, you already know you did it right.

The post ARC Raiders: Throw Snowballs on Rocketeers Guide appeared first on Games Fuze.

As an extraction shooter, it's only natural that ARC Raiders would have a wipe mechanic. Most of the games in the genre do, and while it does it differently, Embark's game very much follows suit. But despite the fact that over a million people participated and wiped their accounts, I still struggle to figure out why you'd even do such a thing.

In other games like ARC Raiders, server wipes are global. A time comes when every player on a given server is Thanos-snapped into oblivion, forced to start from scratch. This resets the game's overall economy and progress, allowing everyone to catch their breath and begin anew. It's an interesting concept, since it removes the massive advantage power users had, putting the entire server on a relatively even playing field.

But ARC Raiders doesn't do that. It asks you to spend a tremendous amount of time gathering resources to be able to wipe, providing you few noteworthy rewards for doing so. Still, over a million people wiped (thanks PC Games N), despite the fact that they're making their overall experience less fun (the quests reset and have to be repeated, most valuable items are lost, etc.).

A lot is lost and not much gained, leaving those who participated at an abject disadvantage compared to everyone else who retained all their skills (now easily reset and redistributed), items, and everything in between.

At least in games like Hunt: Showdown, where the game's money system provides enough incentive to willingly wipe while others do not, there are proper reasons for wiping and "prestiging." That doesn't really exist in ARC Raiders, but Embark has acknowledged this and will introduce more benefits for Expeditions in the future.

I just hope they're tremendous enough that the majority of players will find them interesting, and that they'll start off by not including quest resets. If they do, at least make them different, more rewarding, or cooler for Expedition participants. The repetition ruins the fun.

The post One million ARC Raiders players wiped their accounts with Expeditions, but what’s the point of doing so? appeared first on Destructoid.

ARC Raiders has truly become a breeding ground for innovative ideas with which players aim to maximize their performance topside, both against other players and those evil, mindless ARC drones. Now, some have figured out how to make a functional siege tower, allowing no one to get a shot in.

This seems to have been first discovered (or at least popularized) by streamer TheBurntPeanut (via GamingZar), who managed to somehow assemble several barricades and place them onto a single player, who'd become completely surrounded by walls and essentially immune to incoming damage. It also appears there's enough space for other players to squeeze in, making this the best portable defense system in the game.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DTVFxFwDBzH/

In another clip, it's shown that you can mount just one or a couple of these barricades onto yourself, allowing entrance into buildings and ensuring protection follows you everywhere you go. It's the most fun and ridiculous way to exploit the game's systems, but it will unfortunately be patched out pretty soon, or at least I would think so.

Other exploits, like how players recently discovered the console in ARC Raiders and used commands to tune down various settings to increase visibility and reduce on-screen clutter, have also appeared over the months, but were generally (and quickly) removed by the developers. That isn't enough to prevent players from thinking out of the box, however, and we'll likely continue seeing all sorts of ridiculous contraptions spring up topside.

And I'm honestly all here for it.

The post You can make an actual siege tower in ARC Raiders, and it’s surprisingly effective appeared first on Destructoid.

ARC Raiders, being a modern online game, has loads of settings you can tweak, but reserves the fine-tuning only for the developers, given how much impact this could have on the overall experience.

However, in one of the latest patches, players discovered a console was added, allowing players to carefully tune each and every aspect of the game, chiefly the graphics, providing new ways to optimize for performance.

So, here's how you can enable it.

How to enable the console in ARC Raiders

To get the console in ARC Raiders, you'll have to do a few steps. This is chiefly for the Steam version of the game, as there is apparently no way to enable the console on, well, consoles at the moment.

Here's what you should do:

• Open Steam, go to Library.
• Right click on ARC Raiders and go to Properties.
• Under General, in the Launch Options bar, type in: "-newconsole -log"
• Open the game, which should launch a console alongside it.
• Click on the arrow in the top-right to open up the text bar.
• Type in your commands.

The exact list of commands is still relatively unknown, so we won't be including them here. Using console commands to disable certain aspects of the graphics has also been labeled as cheating by some players and is likely to be targeted by the developers in the coming patches and hotfixes. Therefore, we'll include a list of ethical commands once Embark has cleared things up.

In the meantime, you can try to tweak the settings yourself.

The post How to use console commands in ARC Raiders appeared first on Destructoid.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The Silksong Sweep: Redemption for Team Cherry

The biggest story of the #GOTY night is the absolute dominance of Hollow Knight: Silksong. After years of development that many feared would never end, the game launched as a massive critical and commercial success in late 2025. It managed to snag both Game of the Year and Best Game You Suck At, beating out heavy hitters like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

While Expedition 33 was a critical darling at other shows, Steam users clearly preferred the tight, punishing platforming of Hornet’s journey. The “Best Game You Suck At” category was particularly competitive this year, with Silksong edging out Elden Ring: Nightreign and Marvel Rivals. It’s a rare feat to take the top prize while also being recognized as the most frustratingly difficult experience of the year, but for the Hollow Knight faithful, that challenge is exactly why they waited so long.

The “Labor of Love” Controversy

One of the most debated wins is Baldur’s Gate 3 taking home the Labor of Love award. Larian Studios has been remarkably consistent with free updates and massive patches, even rebuilding the Linux client from the ground up for native Steam Deck support in 2025. However, the win sparked a predictable amount of salt from fans of No Man’s Sky and Helldivers 2, who felt those titles—which have been supported for years (or in the case of Helldivers, fought through a rocky launch)—were more deserving. Still, the Steam community tends to vote for their current favorites, and BG3 remains the platform’s golden child.

Handhelds and Innovation

Best Game on Steam Deck: Hades II won this handily, proving that Supergiant’s rogue-like loop is the gold standard for portable play. It beat out Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and the sleeper hit BALL x PIT. The developers worked specifically to ensure the sequel was “verified” and battery-efficient from day one, and that effort paid off with the community.

Most Innovative Gameplay: This went to ARC Raiders (affiliate link). It was a controversial pick for some, as many felt the mind-bending puzzles of Blue Prince or the genre-blending of Mage Arena pushed the medium further. However, ARC Raiders’ unpredictable community-driven “story generator” in an extraction shooter setting won over the masses, proving that even a crowded genre can feel fresh with the right execution.

Story & Style: The Rise of the New Classics

In a major upset, Dispatch from AdHoc Studio took home Outstanding Story-Rich Game. This superhero workplace comedy managed to beat out cinematic giants like The Last of Us Part II Remastered and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Players were enamored with its episodic structure and meaningful choices, showing a pivot toward tight, focused writing rather than sprawling open-world bloat.

On the visual front, Silent Hill f secured Outstanding Visual Style. It faced stiff competition from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and DOOM: The Dark Ages, but its unique, unsettling Japanese folk-horror aesthetic resonated more than raw graphical power. This win signals that Steam players are increasingly looking for a cohesive art direction that defines the game’s identity.

Rounding Out the Winners

Category	Winner	Notable Runners-Up
VR Game of the Year	The Midnight Walk	Pavlov, Le Mans Ultimate
Better With Friends	PEAK	Battlefield 6, Split Fiction
Best Soundtrack	Clair Obscur: Expedition 33	Spider-Man 2, DELTARUNE
Sit Back and Relax	RV There Yet?	Slime Rancher 2, PowerWash Sim 2

The 2025 results highlight a community that is increasingly independent from mainstream trends. Whether it’s the claymation beauty of The Midnight Walk or the chaotic cooperation in PEAK, the winners reflect a year where creativity and community engagement mattered more than budget. How do you like Steam GOTY 2025 results yourself? Please leave a comment.

The post The Silksong Sweep and the Salt of Love – 2025 GOTY Steam Awards Breakdown appeared first on Game Reviews, News, Videos & More for Every Gamer – PC, PlayStation, Xbox in 2026.