Arc Raiders' wall-breaking exploits took so long to fix because they were 'intrinsic to the way the game is built': 'Those things are very risky to patch rapidly'

Arc Raiders has had its fair share of bugs since launch, some of which were unfortunately pretty game-breaking. Perhaps second only to the recent item duplication glitch was the infamous door glitch, which let players break into locked rooms with just a little shimmy. It was eventually solved not by stopping players from sneaking in, but by turning these rooms into saunas—Embark booby-trapped them with flamethrowers.

After speaking with Embark's Virgil Watkins, design director on Arc Raiders, it's easy to see why this was the team's eventual solution. Really, it was the only feasible one. It may be surprising to laymen, but dealing with wall glitches in games, as it turns out, is "super complicated".

"I know everyone out there thinks like, 'oh, we'll just do this, or just put volumes, or just whatever', but it's inherent, physics-level stuff and networking stuff, and it's intrinsic to the way the game is built," adds Watkins. "And those things are very risky to patch rapidly."

Obviously, it's no good fixing one bug by breaking something even more important somewhere else. I can't imagine what the repercussions of attempting to stop semi-permeable walls would be if done wrong—fully permeable walls? No physical boundaries at all? But I trust that the potential repercussions are dire.

On the other end of the spectrum are glitches like duplication exploits, which Embark had a much faster reaction to: "Stuff like this, where we can see very clear steps involved with it, makes it very easy for us to chase, versus stuff that's far deeper into the engine." In fact, in that case, the team already had a fix planned by the time that it had blown up on social media. As players do, we'd already spawned armies of rubber ducks and Deadlines by the time a hotfix was delivered.