Embark’s sci‑fi extraction shooter just saw more than a million players voluntarily wipe their progress after the first Expedition. Here’s how the reset system works, why people are opting in so early, and how cheating, pacing and replayability are shaping the future of ARC Raiders.
A Million Fresh Starts In ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders’ first big post‑launch beat landed with a surprising stat from Embark Studios: a little over 1 million players chose to completely reset their progress at the end of the game’s first Expedition. In a live‑service shooter where grinding gear is usually sacred, voluntarily nuking your account sounds wild. For ARC Raiders, it is not a failure of the system so much as a core part of the pitch.
That number sits inside a larger context. Embark has talked about more than 12 million players picking up the game, so the wipe crowd is a minority, but still a huge pool of people effectively saying they are ready to start ARC Raiders from scratch. Understanding why means digging into how Expeditions work, what a reset actually does, and where the community currently sits on cheating, progression and long‑term replayability.
How Expeditions And Full Wipes Actually Work
Expeditions in ARC Raiders are seasonal, cyclical runs that Embark plans to rotate every two to three months. For the duration of an Expedition, your Raider pushes through a bespoke progression track tied to specific objectives, loot tables and meta goals. The loop feels familiar if you have played extraction shooters or seasonal ARPGs: drop in, scavenge, complete tasks, extract, upgrade, repeat.
The twist hits at the end. When an Expedition concludes, you are offered the chance to perform a full account reset. This is not just respeccing your build. Opting in wipes your progression, gear and character identity, then drops you back at square one with a fresh profile ready for the next Expedition cycle.
Functionally, that means:
You give up your accumulated gear, currency and unlocked progression from the previous Expedition. Your account is treated as a new arrival to the Sprawl, minus some global unlocks and knowledge that sit outside the wipe framework. You enter the next Expedition as a clean slate, racing through early power spikes again rather than living at endgame indefinitely.
Embark has framed this as a deliberate design pillar rather than a harsh penalty. The studio wants Expeditions to feel like discrete campaigns that you can fully consume, finish and then re‑roll, with the meta shifting enough each time to make that reset tempting.
Why So Many Players Opted To Wipe So Early
On paper, giving up all your loot sounds miserable. In practice, over 1 million players still hit the button. Several factors from early community conversations help explain why.
First is novelty. ARC Raiders is still in its honeymoon window, and the first Expedition acted as a proof of concept. A huge chunk of the audience wants to explore different builds, weapon paths and approaches without feeling shackled to their day‑one choices. A wipe is the cleanest way to re‑experience those early hours that many extraction fans consider the most fun part of the genre.
Second is pacing. Feedback around the first Expedition has often highlighted a front‑loaded sense of excitement. Early and mid‑tier progression moves quickly, with new guns and toys constantly entering your rotation. Later on, the climb slows, and some players report that the grind for incremental upgrades begins to feel samey. Resetting into a fresh Expedition effectively rewinds you back to ARC Raiders’ most energetic phase, where every raid meaningfully changes your loadout.
Third is experimentation with the system itself. This first Expedition was as much a test for the community as for Embark. Players are curious about what carries over, what is different, and how quickly they can rebuild. In a live‑service game built around resets, the social pressure to try the “intended” experience is strong, especially once streamers and community leaders lean into it.
Finally, there is a less glamorous factor: bad runs and bad environments. Some players used the wipe as an escape hatch from early missteps, sub‑optimal builds and messy account histories that included losses to cheaters. For them, starting over is not just exciting, it is a way to shake off baggage.
What Embark Is Promising For Future Expeditions
Embark is very aware that voluntary wipes only stay attractive if each Expedition feels distinct. In interviews around the reset data, the studio has framed the first Expedition as a baseline and talked about layering more variety and incentives into future cycles.
The plan is to keep Expeditions on that two‑to‑three‑month cadence but to make the rules of each seasonier and more self‑contained. That means shaking up enemy compositions, tuning loot tables, introducing new items and weapons that only debut with fresh Expeditions, and bolting on meta goals that reward players who go all‑in during a specific cycle.
Embark has also hinted at better long‑term incentives for those who choose to reset consistently. That could include cosmetic rewards, account‑wide unlocks or systems that recognize repeat Expedition “graduates.” The goal is to preserve the purity of a full wipe while still letting committed players feel like they are building something across the wider life of the game.
The studio’s messaging implies a balancing act. If Expeditions lack variety, resets start to feel like losing progress for nothing. If the rewards are too strong, not resetting becomes the sub‑optimal way to play. Embark needs to thread that needle if it wants the million‑plus reset crowd to grow over time.
Cheating, Trust And The Desire To Start Over
Any discussion of ARC Raiders’ early life has to address cheating. The game attracted millions of players very quickly, and with that audience came the usual wave of wallhacks, aim assists and exploits. PC Gamer and other outlets have documented players using “out of map” glitches and obvious vision hacks to steal extractions and ruin raids.
Embark has publicly acknowledged the problem on the game’s official channels and in its Discord, saying it is taking the issue very seriously. The studio promises significant changes to detection and bans over the next few weeks and months, including updated anti‑cheat systems under the hood, new detection mechanisms, stricter internal rulesets, and client‑side fixes for notorious exploits like clipping outside the playable area. Streamers are also getting new tools aimed at reducing stream sniping.
For average players, the cheating epidemic can look worse than it is because their main window into the problem is high‑MMR streams. Top players inevitably see cheaters more often. Still, the sentiment across social spaces is clear. Many in the community feel that losing an extraction to an obvious hack is disproportionately demoralizing in a game built around high‑stakes runs. That frustration feeds directly into how people view the value of their progression.
It is not a coincidence that some players openly frame Expedition wipes as a fresh start away from an account scarred by cheater encounters. The more confident players feel about Embark’s enforcement, the more meaningful each new Expedition’s long grind will seem.
Progression Pacing: Fun Early, Uneven Later
The first Expedition’s progression curve has drawn a lot of commentary. The broad through line is that ARC Raiders nails the energy of those first dozen or so hours. Upgrades come fast, new weapons like the Kettle and tools like the Trigger Nade shake up your approach constantly, and the meta feels in flux.
As the Expedition wears on, that pace slows. Reaching the upper tiers of gear and refining endgame builds takes more time and focuses your attention on a narrower set of optimal tools. When everyone leans on the same few standout items, runs begin to blur together. Embark has already signaled it is monitoring balance closely, calling out weapons like the Stitcher, the Kettle and the Trigger Nade as candidates for tuning.
All of this plays into the allure of a reset. If most of your memorable stories are clustered in the early to midgame, and the endgame is dominated by a small number of best‑in‑slot options, then the next Expedition’s opening week inevitably becomes the most exciting destination. Resetting ensures you will be in the thick of that early chaos instead of idling on a capped‑out account waiting for whatever endgame tweak arrives next.
For future Expeditions to keep resets compelling, Embark will need to stretch that sense of discovery further into the life of a cycle. That could mean introducing new goals mid‑Expedition, reshuffling loot, or altering mission parameters so that the final weeks are not just about perfecting the same loop you have already run a hundred times.
Long‑Term Replayability: Can Resets Carry The Game?
At its core, ARC Raiders is trying to solve a familiar live‑service dilemma. How do you keep a shooter fresh for years without drowning players in labyrinthine permanent systems? Embark’s answer is to embrace periodic clean breaks instead of endless stacking.
The million‑plus wipes from the first Expedition suggest a sizable portion of the audience is on board with that philosophy, at least for now. Players who like extraction shooters tend to enjoy the tension of early progression, the vulnerability of low‑tier gear and the uncertainty of not knowing what is around the next corner. Resets let the game recapture that feeling again and again instead of freezing the meta at some late‑game equilibrium.
However, resets alone are not a silver bullet. Community conversations already highlight a few long‑term concerns. Some worry that if Expeditions do not diverge enough in structure, enemy design or mission types, every fresh start will feel like re‑running the same campaign with a slightly different set of numbers. Others are anxious about the time investment risk: if cheaters are still around or if balance swings too hard, an entire Expedition’s worth of grinding can feel wasted.
Embark is trying to answer those fears on multiple fronts. Anti‑cheat upgrades and stricter bans are meant to protect the value of a single raid. Balance passes and more diverse itemization are intended to keep the meta from calcifying. And the promise of more varied and rewarding Expeditions is the glue that is supposed to bind those short‑term fixes into a long‑term structure.
Where ARC Raiders Stands After Its First Big Reset
The headline number of more than a million voluntary wipes after the first Expedition is striking, but it is also a snapshot of a work in progress. It shows there is an audience willing to buy into ARC Raiders as a cyclical, seasonal extraction adventure where progress is meant to be temporary.
The next few Expeditions will reveal whether Embark can turn that early curiosity into a sustainable rhythm. If the studio delivers on its promises of bigger variety, stronger anti‑cheat tools and more thoughtful incentives for repeat resets, those fresh starts could become the reason people keep coming back. If not, that reset button risks transforming from an exciting choice into a reminder of what the game is asking you to give up.
For now, ARC Raiders sits in a fascinating place. It is a shooter where losing everything is sometimes the point, starting over is a feature, and more than a million players have already decided that a clean slate is worth more than their hard‑earned loot.