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Duo matchmaking will work like this: first, we prioritise Solos and Squads to play separately. After that, we prioritise Duos to play with other Duos, and for Trios to play with Trios. Please note that this is not a 100 percent guaranteed system, so you may at times run into differing constellations of players other than your own.

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You see, Arc Raiders is a high-stakes game in which dying up on the surface will result in the loss of most of your inventory. As such, players have been busting out the emote wheel and microphone to talk down other raiders. There's nothing stopping you from extracting from a match together, after all. Why shoot someone if you don't need to?

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But then we transferred to the Buried City map, and Arc Raiders began to feel more like its own thing. The map consists of densely clustered multiple-storey buildings, ranging from elegant Old Town areas to square apartment blocks, all of them jutting from a sea of sand. The sand dunes shape this blocky urban layout into an atmospheric playground of sweeping slopes, partly obscured entrances, and undulating cover. Wonderful stuff. During our initial foray, we broke into one of the apartment blocks and roved from floor to floor, tip-toing across bridges of beaten metal and riding ziplines up the elevator shaft.

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What if, instead of having to hand-animate or use mocap for every single frame, we created a model, gave it physical attributes, then used AI to train it to walk? We've come so far now, he told the mag. Let's say that you want a new weapon built in The Finals. We can take a video from YouTube, feed it through our tools and pipelines, and [produce] a 3D model of the weapon you had in that video.

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"We noticed some discussions around loot or 'gear score' matchmaking," Embark representative Ossen says (via GamesRadar). "While it is true that the team has previously evaluated loot/gear-based as well as other types of matchmaking principles, right now the focus is on maintaining the split between solos and squads to keep those groups on an even playing field whenever possible." "After launch, we will continue to monitor how things go," Ossen says. "The team is determined to ensure that players have high-quality rounds that are varied and interesting, but fair."

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I'm sitting inside a small storage room, neighbouring an elevator that'll whisk me to safety and a massive payday. I'm cranking open one last storage locker before I head home, then bam: disaster. Another player sprints towards my location with murder in their heart and a bullet in the chamber. I turn around just as the door opens and we trade fire, each heavily injured and ducking behind cover. At this point, something strange happens: We start chatting.

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With the conclusion of the Arc Raiders server slam, players came away telling tales of their daring escapes and close calls. But one shared experience linked many jumpy raiders together: getting spooked by tumbleweeds. It sounds strange, but there's a good reason why. In Arc Raiders and all extraction shooters for that matter, an enemy player getting the jump on you often means certain death.

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"There are technical considerations as well: Watkins said there are concerns with the game's geometry and quality of assets that would also have to be addressed, because everything in Arc Raiders is meant to be seen from the distance of an over-the-shoulder view: 'Once you start being able to put your face right up against an asset, it kind of falls apart.' The net result is that it is 'very, very implausible' that Embark will ever add a first-person perspective, Watkins said—although he gets why people would ask for one. Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team."

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Compare it to Dune: Awakening. This game was a massive presence on Steam during its open beta, quickly reaching roughly 150,000 concurrent users on Steam on its opening day. Arc Raiders looks to be on track to pass the bar Dune: Awakening set, a good indicator of its popularity. It is of course unfair to compare Arc Raiders to the most recent beta powerhouse of Battlefield 6, which had 250,000 players to play in its open beta across all platforms.