Arc Raiders, the game PC Gamer shooter expert Morgan Park called "the most exciting extraction shooter of 2025," is set to launch on October 30. That's not much more than a month away, but you'll have a chance to give it a go one more time before it happens in the upcoming server slam, an open-to-all playtest set to run October 17-19.
I'm not sure when we started calling these things "server slams" rather than playtests, but the term is certainly evocative in reflecting the goal: Ensuring, as much as such a thing is possible, that the servers for a popular online game won't collapse under the weight of the launch-day rush of players. To that end, the Arc Raiders slam is wide open, available on all platforms—Steam and Epic for PC, plus PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S—and with no pre-registration required: Just show and go.
"This is where we’ll really put Arc Raiders through its paces ahead of full launch," executive producer Aleksander Grøndal said. "Our goal is simple: Make sure that on October 30, when the servers go live, every player experiences the game exactly as we've intended—polished, balanced, and ready for action."
Hopefully, anyway, although these things have a habit of going sideways when the big day comes. As PC Gamer's Fraser Brown pointed out when he declared 2024 "the year of server issues" (in February, no less), popular hits like Helldivers 2 and Last Epoch struggled badly at launch under the weight of unexpected interest. More recently, Funcom expressed confidence that Dune: Awakening servers wouldn't implode at launch, and while it wasn't a complete catastrophe, yeah, there were problems.
Arc Raiders may well face similar challenges, because it's just that good: Jake Tucker, who knows a thing or two about shooters himself, said last year that it "could be the extraction shooter that finally brings the genre to the masses." And if those masses all show up at once on launch day, it might get a little crowded. A server stress test won't eliminate that possibility completely, but it should at least highlight any obvious issues that may have gone overlooked amidst all the pre-release excitement.
Developer Embark Studios said access to the server slam "will roll out slowly on day one"—how exactly that will work isn't clear at this point, but the studio said more information will be provided closer to kickoff. Progress will not carry over into the full release of Arc Raiders, but everyone who takes part in the test will get an exclusive Server Slam backpack for use in the full game.
Preorders for Arc Raiders are available now on Steam and the Epic Games Store, at $40/£31/€40 for the base game, or $60/£50/€60 for the deluxe edition, the differences between which are listed below. Embark said it's opting to avoid the free-to-play model so it can "focus more on the fun" rather than "encouraging players to make purchases."
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