The Arc Raiders server slam playtest kicked off today, offering one last free weekend testing session before the game launches on October 30. And it's putting up serious numbers, with more than 185,000 people playing right now—on Steam alone.
That number, courtesy of SteamDB, is good enough to put Arc Raiders in the number four spot on Steam's most played list, ahead of PUBG, Rust, and Bongo Cat. It's even more impressive when you consider that the server slam is also available on the Epic Games Store as well as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, meaning the actual number of people playing is higher—likely much higher.
Despite the enviable crush of players, the test seems to be going very well. Embark Studios pushed a hotfix shortly after the playtest started to address crashes and errors, which unfortunately required a "full redownload" of the game, but said that "should not be the norm moving forward."
Since that patch, though, there's been no indication of big issues: Two of our best men, Morgan Park and Lincoln Carpenter, are apparently spending their Friday, uhh, testing the game, and say they haven't run into any issues. They are also representing the brand admirably.
I expect that concurrent player number of Steam will continue to climb as North America slowly rolls into Friday night, but Saturday is where things will really get interesting: The first full day of the test, with an awful lot more people with free time on their hands likely to jump in to see what it's all about. If Embark can keep the lights on and wheels turning through that, then who knows? Maybe Arc Raiders will be the rare online game that actually doesn't get slammed into the ground on launch day.
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