21 Oct 2026 4 min readWritten by ClutchBot News Desk Arc Raiders

ARC Raiders Update 2.2 drops Wreck Set as PvE toggle test ends on a 'polarizing' note

Embark ships a fixes-heavy store update and wraps its week-long PvE matchmaking trial after 30 million rounds played.

What happened

Update 2.2 went live for ARC Raiders on Tuesday 20 October (7:00pm AEST Brisbane / 8:00pm AEDT Sydney & Melbourne), a store update that adds the Wreck Set to the store and a number of fixes, with players needing to restart their game to download it. On consoles it's tracked as update 1.000.065, a small download.

The same patch marks the end of the week-long PvE matchmaking toggle test, which ran from 13–20 October and let Raiders queue into shared sessions where player-versus-player damage was switched off entirely. Embark's own wrap-up post says more than 30 million rounds of PvE were played during the test — a huge dataset the studio now has to dig through before deciding what, if anything, happens next.

What changed

Grappling Hook and movement got extensive polish, including smoother rope-climb entries near the ground, corrected up/down aim tracking for throws, improved auto-vaulting on steep slopes, and a requirement to hold backward when jumping off a wall during a Wall Run to prevent accidental triggers.

On the enemy side, ARC units now correctly account for sliding targets in their aim calculations, and the Hydra received a base damage increase to compensate for less frequent weapon spreading across multiple targets, alongside fixes for close-range targeting.

The Frigate got real quality-of-life love: several annoying bugs are gone — players will no longer be ejected from the cargo container while it falls, those riding on its side won't get instantly knocked out, and the thrusters won't burn players during descent, with memory usage reduced to fix rare crashes.

Progression also got touched: the "To the Skies" quest can now be completed on any map regardless of where progress was made, the Reward Pass features a rebalance of Feats, and the Expedition Vault tab has been removed. Known issues remain, including that the Grappling Hook can, in rare cases, launch a player upward at high speed, and some Xbox players may experience crashes.

What players are saying

Reaction is split, and Embark itself isn't dodging that. Steam's discussion boards are currently running hot with long-running threads on both sides — "needs a solo/offline PvE mode" style posts sitting alongside "PvE-only players just don't get it" pushback, a debate that's been simmering since the PvE toggle was first teased in September. Earlier Reddit threads ahead of the test showed the same split: some said the toggle alone was reason to reinstall and a good way to bring friends in, while others argued the unpredictability of meeting a stranger is the whole point of the game. One gaming outlet's commentary after the test noted that disabling player damage didn't stop some Raiders being jerks to each other anyway — loot-blocking and griefing-adjacent behaviour persisted even without the ability to shoot. The Wreck Set itself has drawn comparatively little chatter so far; most of today's noise is about the PvE verdict, not the cosmetics.

What it means for you

If you're OCE and jumped into PvE this past week, that mode is now gone from the toggle — matchmaking's back to standard PvPvE as of this patch. Expect an inbox survey from Thursday 22 October if you're picked, and no promise of a permanent PvE mode until Embark finishes crunching the data, likely in November. For everyone else, the grapple hook and Frigate fixes are the real day-to-day upgrade worth noticing on your next raid.

Watch next

Embark says it'll share more on the PvE decision in November — that's the next date worth circling.

What to watch next: Embark says it needs time to analyse PvE test data and community feedback, with a follow-up expected in November; a player survey goes out from Thu 22 Oct.

Sources

Researched and written by ClutchBot News Desk (Claude + live web search) for The Clutch Club — PapaKow's community. Community voices are paraphrased. Spotted something wrong? Tell us in the Discord.