ARC Raiders and Marathon have both outlined plans to include dedicated PvE modes in the near future. Find out more details about what both extraction games are doing to win back their players.
Two Extraction Shooters Are Arriving at the Same PvE Solution
ARC Raiders Is Testing a PvE Toggle in October
In a curious bit of timing, ARC Raiders and Marathon are both making PvE a bigger part of their futures. Within the same day, Embark and Bungie outlined plans that give PvE a much larger role in their futures.
ARC Raiders is circling back to its vision for its unlaunched iteration, as Embark Studios will test a PvE matchmaking toggle from October 13 to October 20, 2026. According to their blog post on September 24, this beta test introduces a separate mode that removes damage between Raiders entirely, leaving solos, duos, and trios to cooperate against the ARC.
Embark said the PvE option is intended for players who want to "scavenge, complete quests, explore, in relative safety," without constantly worrying about other hostile players. However, the studio will also tweak the mode to add risk and challenge, with the biggest change being that ARCs can now target the player they’re crawling while downed, but will ignore them otherwise. Additionally, overall loot value is lowered to compensate for the relative safety, while regular mode will have higher baseline loot values.
This doesn’t include ARC Raider’s higher-tension conditions, namely Night Raids, Hidden Bunker, Locked Gate, and Frigate, as Embark said those activities specifically rely on the uncertainty created by encounters with other players. Time spent in the new mode won’t affect a player’s PvPvE matchmaking rating.
Marathon Is Getting Its First Permanent PvE Mode in December
Bungie also published a blog post on September 24, the same day as ARC Raiders’ post, detailing its plan to add a permanent PvE mode to Marathon, included in its roadmap stretching to March 2027. The "Future of Marathon" development update outlined three updates: the Nightfall Refresh in October, Symbiosis in December, and an unnamed "leap forward with Marathon’s evolution in March."
The most significant change comes with Symbiosis on December 8, which adds Marathon’s first permanent PvE mode. While Marathon ran a roguelite PvE mode called Vault Breaker for two weeks, it was deliberately designed as a largely self-contained experiment, as any weapons or gear found during a run were left behind after extraction.
Meanwhile, the upcoming permanent PvE mode will be a part of Marathon’s core experience, where players can "explore, experiment, and take on challenges" without worrying about being hunted by other Runners. Bungie says parts of the mode are still being finalized and has yet to detail its progression, structure, and rewards, and will share a deeper look before the update launches.
By March, Bungie plans to have an interconnected system of permanent PvE, PvP, and PvEvP experiences, alongside deeper Runner progression, a reworked Cradle system, more focused questlines and narrative, new alien enemies, and an entirely new zone.
Both Marathon and ARC Raiders Are Finding Reasons to Return to PvE
Bungie’s Future of Marathon video gave players a behind-the-scenes look from the developers. Marathon's senior design lead, Kevin Yanes, acknowledged that the launch didn’t resonate with players, saying "we all thought we were gonna bring extraction to the masses, and we didn’t." Yanes said the repeated cycle of failure proved too punishing for many players, and the constant loop of failure in the extraction genre didn’t speak to as many players as they'd hoped.
Recently, Bungie has published a blog post announcing that the studio is unvaulting Destiny 2’s lost content. In the same post, it also promises that Marathon was going to "evolve it beyond the genre constraints we placed on it", while retaining what made it special.
Bungie has since said it wants to evolve Marathon "beyond the genre constraints we placed on it," eventually giving players meaningful options whether they prefer cooperative PvE, competitive PvP, or traditional PvPvE. The shift began months ago, when game director Joe Ziegler said the studio wanted Marathon to offer different survival experiences, depending on whether players wanted to "full sweat or lean back and chill," with the team exploring pure PvP, PvE, and PvP-lite activities.
ARC Raiders has reached a similar destination for a noticeably different reason. Embark originally conceived ARC Raiders as a raid-based PvE co-op game before pivoting to a high-tension PvPvE extraction format, but the player base that formed around the finished game has proven far more cooperative than that pivot might suggest.
According to Embark’s latest player data, 37% of players fall into its "friendly co-op" group, compared with 27% classified as mixed and 34% as pure PvP players. More importantly, Embark says the friendly group has continued to grow since launch, while the PvP population has remained stable.
That behavior also shows up in Embark’s surveys. More than 70% of friendly players want fewer hostile encounters, but even 40% of players categorized as PvP-focused said the same. Overall, 51% of surveyed ARC Raiders players expressed interest in a dedicated PvE option. As the studio put it, "we’re seeing a large and growing group of Raiders who come to the Rust Belt for the co-op and the ARC, not fighting with other Raiders."
ARC Raiders and Marathon face similar player count and retention issues in their extraction games, with both Embark and Bungie seeing PvE as a solution. Whether their reasoning and methods differ slightly, both studios are testing PvPvE extraction games that can retain their high-risk identity while giving players the option to leave PvP players to their own lobbies.
Source:
We’re testing a PvE Toggle: here’s what it means for you
The Future of Marathon
Launch, Learnings, and What’s Next
The Next Chapter for Bungie
