Free Steam playtest for upcoming extraction shooter kicks off with a bang — runs on Linux despite Easy Anti-Cheat
The free Server Slam play test for Arc Raiders has officially started ahead of the full October 30 launch, and it seems to be driving the game's continued popularity, with the upcoming extraction shooter from The Finals developer, Embark Studios, now sitting comfortably in fourth place on the SteamDB current global sales chart, outperforming Borderlands 4 and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 for sales.
Another titbit that was uncovered during the free playtest was that the Arc Raiders runs nearly flawlessly on Linux, despite Embark's use of Easy Anti-Cheat. While there are a number of old reports on ProtonDB about Arc Raiders having some troubles on Linux, the current state of the game seems to be perfectly functional on a variety of Linux distributions, even without tweaks. At the time of writing, A1RM4X has been streaming Arc Raiders gameplay on Linux to YouTube for over three hours, seemingly without issue.
It also doesn't seem to matter too much what hardware you're using for Arc Raiders on Linux, since there are positive reports from players on both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. There's also no reason to suspect that Arc Raiders will lose Linux support any time soon, since the developer is known to be friendly to Linux, with The Finals still being playable on Linux nearly two years after launch.
Both Arc Raiders and The Finals use Easy Anti-Cheat, which, despite many developers not making use of it, has built-in Linux compatibility. It remains to see how well Easy Anti-Cheat and Embark manage to quash cheating in Arc Raiders post-launch. Since it is a competitive online PvPvE game, cheating is to be expected. That said, as we've seen before, there's no guarantee that even the strictest anti-cheat systems will be effective at banishing cheaters from a game.
Arc Raiders also has relatively tame minimum system requirements, meaning something like a Lenovo Legion Go S (curr. $649.99 from Lenovo US) or Asus ROG Ally X running SteamOS should breeze through it with decent frame rates.
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