ARC Raiders has been a major success just days after its release. In fact, it’s been so wildly successful that it managed to hit a peak of 350,000 players in the past 24 hours.
This massive surge in popularity led to connection issues, with players reporting lengthy queues and matchmaking errors while playing the game.
Needless to say, it’s been a massive hit, that a bunch of other developers said something positive about the game.
One of them is Palworld developer John Buckley, otherwise known as Bucky, who praised the game for its technical prowess and how its developers have properly used and taken advantage of Unreal Engine 5.

In his Twitter post, Bucky stated that “ARC Raiders might be the most technically impressive game I’ve played all year.”
While he did emphasize that Ball X Pit and Megabonk are the most fun, ARC Raiders is a technical marvel that made full use of what Unreal Engine 5 has to offer.
ARC Raiders as the New Benchmark for Unreal Engine Games?
Bucky then went on to say that it’s easy to say “eww UE slop” to games these days. However, he believes that ARC Raiders might just be the new benchmark for UE5 games.
He added that he’s in awe of what Embark Studios achieved. To be fair, that’s a valid take.
Ever since Unreal Engine 5 was released, it has received a lot of criticism from players, mainly due to stuttering issues in most Unreal Engine games.

However, ARC Raiders seems to defy those criticisms by coming out as a properly optimized game. In fact, a lot of people have praised Embark Studios for optimizing the game properly while having stunning visuals on top of that.
As a matter of fact, ARC Raiders is well-optimized that it’s even playable on the Steam Deck, though you have to configure some settings first.

According to SteamdeckHQ, you’ll have to use either Proton GE or the Proton 10 Beta in the Steam game settings.
The game will also default to Low settings, which can significantly affect the game’s graphical fidelity on the handheld. You can switch the upscaling method from TAUU to FSR3, then set it to Balanced.
This way, you can still enjoy decent visuals without sacrificing performance.
Overall, the game is well-optimized, and Bucky’s take on ARC Raiders being the new benchmark for games made on Unreal Engine 5 might just be true.
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