We covered this back in September, but an awful lot of people are really looking forward to Arc Raiders and so I reckon it’s worth a reminder: The open-to-all Arc Raiders server slam playtest is now live, giving everyone a chance to dive in for the weekend ahead of its full release on October 30.
Game servers for big, anticipated new releases have a nasty tendency of crumbling under the load of a big launch day, as Dune: Awakening reminded us earlier this year. That’s where a server slam—a stress test with a catchier name—comes in: The goal is to hammer the infrastructure as hard as possible to see how it holds up. It’s not a guarantee of a smooth-sailing launch day (Dune: Awakening also reminded us of that), but it’s at least an attempt, and also a way of rooting out any overlooked issues that might trigger surprise headaches.
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For you, though, what it is, is three days of playtime with one of the games we’re looking forward to the most in 2025: PC Gamer shooterguy Morgan Park said back in April that Arc Raiders “is a much more exciting extraction shooter than Marathon,” which may or may not have played a role in Marathon’s delay to some indefinite future date just a few months later. Jake Tucker, also a fan of the genre, had similar thoughts following a November 2024 hands-on session, declaring that “Arc Raiders could be something very special indeed.”
