You might recall that just two short years ago in February 2024, Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite maker Epic Games, with grand plans to create a persistent Disney universe within Fortnite based on Disney franchises. We've already seen part of this deal bear fruit with the introduction of Disnyeland in Fortnite, and according to a new report from Bloomberg, we're due to get the next fruit in November 2026. And according to the report, it's an incredibly significant release for Epic, because it is meant to mark the beginning of its comeback tour. Epic Games recently laid of 1,000 […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/epic-games-disney-game-november-2026-shooting-game-along-the-lines-of-arc-raiders/

Nexon, the parent company behind Embark Studios and its massive PvPvE extraction shooter hit ARC Raiders has long been a supporter of AI and Generative AI (GenAI) entering the game development workflow. It was Nexon's CEO, Junghun Lee, who last year said that players should assume all game makers are using GenAI, which got a rousing rejection from several game developers at the time. So it's no surprise that in the company's latest Capital Markets Briefing, Lee and the company's recently appointed executive chairman (and head of Embark Studios), Patrick Söderlund, both boasted about how Nexon's approach to AI and […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nexon-says-ai-approach-doesnt-replace-creative-people-it-frees-them-to-create/

During a recent financial presentation, Nexon President, Junghun Lee, commented on the recent successes and failures with its online games over the past year. Interestingly, The First Descendant was named as a struggling title, despite its initially strong launch. 

Lee was commenting on Nexon's ability to “sustain relationships with players”. When assessing titles that didn't hit the mark, The First Descendant and Dungeon&Fighter Mobile were listed as games with retention challenges, going as far as to say that The First Descendant had “no staying power” after its strong launch.

While these titles struggled, Lee also listed a number of significant wins for Nexon. For starters, the MapleStory franchise has achieved 43% year-on-year growth, and the Dungeon&Fighter PC game has also been a hit in China and Korea.

As you would expect, Arc Raiders is also listed amongst the publisher's biggest achievements, enabling Nexon to become a more “globally competitive” company.

KitGuru Says: Have you played The First Descendant at all since launch? 

Following the explosive launch of Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders late last year, the team shared an official roadmap detailing the next 12 months of the live-service extraction shooter’s update plans. Ahead of its arrival later today, the team have shared everything you need to know about ARC Raiders’ Flashpoint Update.

Releasing a blog post to detail all of the upcoming content coming to ARC Raiders with the Flashpoint Update, the team at Embark have shared everything players will need to know upon its arrival later today. Partially teased in the initial roadmap, the Flashpoint Update is set to introduce the following:

• New Major Map Condition – ARC Operations (Close Scrutiny)
  • Features less loot around the map
  • Increased importance on the ARC Assessor
• New ARC Threat – Vaporizer
  • A flying ARC type featuring “devastating laser attacks and idiosyncratic attack patterns”

• New Weapons and Items
  • Canto submachine gun with medium ammo
  • Dolabra energy shotgun with a variable focus
  • Surge Coil deployable defensive device
• New Project – High Gain Antenna
• You can now increase the types of loot Scrappy collects by feeding him particular items
• Enemy placement adjustments
• Crafting improvements with less tab-switching required to craft gear

Of course, the update will also launch alongside a suite of new paid cosmetics – a staple for pretty much all live-service titles at this point. Regardless, the Flashpoint Update represents the next stage in ARC Raiders’ first year on the market. It will be interesting to see how players respond to these changes and additions.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of the Flashpoint Update? What feature are you most looking forward to? Do you enjoy the game’s various Map Conditions? Let us know down below.

As Steam puts its Spring Sale in the rear view, the Epic Games Store has just kicked off its own Spring Sale, giving PC players another chance to grab some great games for heavy discounts, just on a different digital storefront. Some of the most notable sales include titles like ARC Raiders and Borderlands 4, which are 20% off and 30% off, respectively, though some games are as much as 80% off. Nearing that level of discount includes iconic titles like Red Dead Redemption 2: Ultimate Edition, which is a whopping 80% off (it's also 75% off if you just […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/epic-gams-store-spring-sale-2026-arc-raiders-gta-v-borderlands-4/

Embark Studios is about to release its next major update for ARC Raiders, with this one called the Flashpoint Update. It adds a new ARC enemy to the game, two new weapons, a new kind of map condition called ARC Operations, and it all goes live tomorrow, March 31, 2026. ARC Operations are new map conditions, and the first one, Close Scrutiny, seems meant to encourage more PvP action. When Close Scrutiny is live in a map, there's less loot available in that zone, but somewhere lies a new kind of machine called an Assessor. It doesn't seem to be […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/arc-raiders-flashpoint-update-new-arc-weapons-map-condition-more/

ARC Raiders developer Embark Studios and one of its co-founders and now former chief content officer Rob Runesson following allegations of sexual misconduct on Runesson's part towards a popular female streamer known for playing Embark's other major live service game, The Finals. First reported by IGN, the allegations initially appeared last month in a livestream, where an anonymous user submitted them to streamer Balise, who read them live on stream. The Google Doc Balise reads through was later recreated and shared online through The Finals community. In the document, the anonymous user who submitted them claims to have been aware […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/arc-raiders-dev-embark-studios-parts-ways-with-co-founder-amidst-sexual-misconduct-allegations/

Arc Raiders was easily one of 2025 biggest surprise hits, with the PvPvE extraction shooter having sold over 14 million copies since the game’s launch in October while continuing to see strong levels of engagement from players. Perhaps the biggest stain on the game was its use of gen-AI for its voice acting – some of which has since been replaced.

Taking part in an interview conducted by the publication Gamesindustry.biz, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund spoke on the development of Arc Raiders, its relatively small budget and the size of the team itself.

The full interview can be found HERE, but by far the most interesting part pertains to Arc Raiders’ use of gen-AI. While the team have addressed this previously, Söderlund spoke on their evolving use of the technology, stating:

“We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game. For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren't as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio.”

Despite the use of AI, Embark admits that nothing can replace a voice actor’s talent, claiming: “We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices. There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is.”

Söderlund continued, “We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It's also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”

AI in art remains a contentious topic, and one which is changing all the time as the tech itself evolves. Here’s to hoping that eventually all of Arc Raider’s AI voices are replaced by real talent.

KitGuru says: What do you think of Arc Raiders’ use of AI? Is it distracting? Let us know down below.

ARC Raiders is one of the biggest successes in the video game industry lately, and the game's story is one that keeps getting better the more we hear about it. Former EA and DICE developers coming together to make the games they wanted to make, taking their time to build ARC Raiders, having the wherewithal to give it time to be worked (and reworked) while still getting another project over the line, before it was ready for prime time this past October. After learning hours ago that Embark almost went back on its initial pivot from PvE to PvPvE back […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/embark-studios-made-arc-raiders-at-fraction-of-the-cost-of-aaa-budgets-not-with-ai-but-old-ways-of-working/

Embark Studios' smash success of 2025, ARC Raiders, had a long development road that got it to being one of the most popular games on the market today. It was initially meant to be the studios' debut project, before it was delayed, and Embark focused on releasing what would become The Finals first. All the way back in 2021, when it was first announced, it was intended to be a free-to-play co-op shooter where you worked together with other players to take down the giant ARC robots. Less than a year after its reveal at The Game Awards 2021, it […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/embark-studios-almost-pivoted-arc-raiders-back-to-pve-after-first-pivot-to-pvp/

Embark Studios' latest update for ARC Raiders isn't your bog-standard fixes or new content release. Instead, it's an update that the team rushed out the door this morning after a report from tech blogger and systems engineer Timothy Meadows pointed to an incident where two ARC Raiders players' private Discord DMs (direct messages) appeared in a game log file. Per Meadows report, the game's Discord SDK captured private messages between two users and a Discord Bearer token. It was a massive over-extension of the data that Embark collects through ARC Raiders' Discord SDK, an issue that is thankfully now fixed […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/arc-raiders-latest-update-fixes-massive-security-flaw-private-discord-dms-collected-by-embark/

Marathon, the new first-person extraction shooter from Bungie is days away from launching at the time of this writing. It'll be out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on March 5, 2026, but you can play it right now if you want to on its Server Slam Test. So far, the test seems to be going well, at least by its player numbers. On Steam, the test has so far peaked at 143,621 concurrent players, and while we'll see how players feel about the game when the test is done, one thing that's already been called out is that, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/marathon-was-censoring-arc-raiders-in-its-chat/

Embark Studio's new Shrouded Sky update for ARC Raiders isn't a major expansion or anything, but it almost feels close to that kind of update, because it includes more than a few significant changes. A slew of weapons have been given nerfs to try and better balance PvP play, an element of progression that wasn't benefiting half of the player base is now gone, there are two new ARC threats to take down, and that's before getting to the fact that there's a whole hurricane for players to deal with now. The update is now live, with the full patch […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/arc-raiders-shrouded-sky-update-hurricane-map-condition-arc-threats-embark-studios/

Embark Studios has just revealed the next update and map condition coming to ARC Raiders, with hurricanes arriving next week on February 24, 2026, in the game's new Shrouded Sky update. The short teaser doesn't show any gameplay, but it does make it clear how disruptive and dangerous the hurricanes will be for raiders who choose to brave the weather while the condition is in effect. A blog post on the ARC Raiders' official website digs further into what raiders will have to deal with, and it's a little more than some high-speed winds. "The climate is damaged and unpredictable, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-arc-raiders-hurricane-map-condition-arrives-in-shrouded-sky-update-next-week/

When you start your journey in ARC Raiders, certain ARCs, like Rocketeers and Bastion's, can send a chill down the spine of any new Raider. You'll eventually learn how to take these machines down, but there's always something bigger waiting in the wings, and in this new extraction shooter, that 'something bigger' is the Matriarchs. They're the closest thing ARC Raiders has to a boss encounter. You can't take them down yourself (not without some serious luck and know-how), and they're arguably the most deadly machines you'll face as far as the game's PvE elements are concerned. But that hasn't […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/embark-gave-arc-raiders-players-too-effective-abilities-take-down-matriarchs/