You could say “no two matches are alike” about plenty of online multiplayer games, and it’s a statement that is certainly true for Arc Raiders. Encountering other players and not knowing whether they’ll be friendly or not, getting lucky with your loot haul and hightailing it to an extraction point or coming up short with just junk to recycle, and being spotted by Arc enemies or successfully avoiding them as you sneak around undetected are just three of the ways 2025’s best shooter keeps you on your toes.
This is part of the reason the game has been so successful, because while it has plenty of other strengths — crisp shooting mechanics, phenomenal audio design, incredible tension and atmosphere — nothing beats that core gameplay loop where you could, in theory, encounter anything.
Problem is, it is only a theory, because when you’re almost 100 hours into the game (guilty as charged) and you’ve traipsed the lands of Dam Battlegrounds, Spaceport, and so on many times, it becomes clear there are numerous ways the game could be so much more dynamic. For one, the tougher Arc enemies — your Bombardiers, Rocketeers, Leapers, and so on — all typically spawn in the same places on each map. If you’re a frequenter of Buried City, you’ll no doubt have seen the Rocketeer that circles around the Grandioso Apartments countless times. The same goes for the Leaper on Spaceport, wandering around the base of the Launch Towers.
Once you know where the Arc enemies are going to be, it’s far easier to avoid them. It’d undoubtedly make the game more unforgiving if these spawns were more random, but there should be an element of it. The fact our Arc Raiders interactive maps show exactly where to find each type of Arc foe on every map shouldn’t be possible, because dynamic spawns would result in more unpredictable gameplay.
Another example is with loot. Each map in Arc Raiders has myriad points of interest, some of which are designated as having either medium or high value loot. When I first started playing, I assumed — as did many others, from browsing the game’s subreddit and speaking to friends — that these would change each round, so the same places don’t become guaranteed high-traffic areas. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, and anyone who has paid a visit to Research & Administration on Dam Battlegrounds or Medical Research on Stella Montis can attest to this.
Finally, the most requested area of improvement for dynamism in Arc Raiders isn’t technically within the gameplay itself: it’s all about the event schedules. The five (and counting) maps have a bunch of different events that can take place, ranging from Lush Blooms, which makes natural items such as apricots and lemons easier to find, to the Queen or Matriarch events, which spawn in colossal, endgame bosses.
All of these events are on a set 24-hour schedule. Every day, the same event on the same map will happen at the same time. This immediately becomes a problem for players who can only play at set times, such as those with full-time jobs, school, or any other number of life commitments. When the rarer events roll around, such as Hidden Bunker and Locked Gate, some players haven’t ever had the opportunity to play them. Reddit user Skilltrain explained that because they’re in Australia, they’re essentially non-existent, while MrClementin3 rightly calls it “completely unreasonable that [they] have to wake up at 5 a.m. just to experience content in the game.”
This is the biggest problem with the game, according to the hivemind of the Arc Raiders‘ subreddit right now, with a number of posts getting lots of attention. The simplest solution is to make it a schedule that rotates for an odd number of hours. Alternatively, even random event times would be better, because even though it’d be frustrating when the specific one you’re looking for doesn’t show up, it beats needing to wake up in the middle of the night or take time away from life obligations.
Embark Studios has been great at introducing new content, such as the quick Stella Montis launch, followed by the Winter Blooms event and the Cold Snap map condition. And there’s such a simple solution for the event scheduling issue, and when Hidden Bunker is required for in-game trials, it’s simply unfair some players won’t get the chance to play it, solely thanks to their timezone. Arc Raiders just needs to shake up the formula a little more to keep everyone happy.
