ARC Raiders Players Have Found an Even More Wild Way to Cheat

Some ARC Raiders on PC have reportedly managed to bypass the game's camera limits by editing one hidden configuration setting, giving themselves a much wider field of view and a massive advantage that comes with it. The exploit appears to have been unintentionally enabled by a recent ARC Raiders patch, though developer Embark Studios seems to have already patched it.
Like any other remotely popular multiplayer game out there, ARC Raiders has had issues with cheaters since its release. As time goes on, many of those problems can be traced back to paid trainers that bad actors sell on third-party sites, allowing other bad actors to gain various unfair advantages. Occasionally, something much less premeditated materializes, enabling opportunists to take advantage. In the latest example of the latter, some FOV settings were recently tweaked by players in unintended ways.
Over the last few days leading up to January 10, reports of ARC Raiders players finding a way to change the game's field of view have been surfacing online. The story became so widespread that multiple clearly cheating individuals with outrageously wide FOVs were occasionally streaming their exploits on Twitch. Based on the VODs reviewed by Game Rant, ARC Raiders' recently introduced Stella Montis was among the most cheater-impacted maps earlier this month. That's not because the exploit was more difficult to replicate on a different level; in all likelihood, the overrepresentation of Stella Montis among FOV cheaters' preferred maps possibly has something to do with it being specifically designed with frequent PvP in mind, making any kind of advantage—fair or not—potentially much more lucrative.
According to an official notice posted to the game's Discord server on Saturday, Embark had already found a way to combat ARC Raiders cheaters relying on this particular technique as of January 10, just over a day after knowledge of it became widespread. A studio representative suggested that the issue came down to an inadvertent ability to activate the so-called "NewConsole" command in a PC version of the game, consequently being able to change one's field of view. "This feature was never meant to be player-facing," the official wrote. While Embark patched out one particular method of editing the FOV, the developer is currently monitoring telemetry data and other information sources for any related exploits that might have slipped through the cracks as well.
The FOV tweak was just one of several ways console commands allowed players to gain an unfair advantage, provided they knew what they were doing. Using the very basic toolset of Unreal Engine 5, it’s possible to leverage its console to disable individual visual effects such as shadows, dust, and fog, all of which enhance visibility and thus offer a notable edge in competitive shooters, extraction or otherwise. In this case, enabling the console was reportedly as simple as editing a configuration file on PC. That's not unusual, but it's usually also easily prevented, as Unreal Engine 5 gives developers the option to easily disable console access in game builds. While this is typically enforced in ARC Raiders updates, it appears that step was missed in the latest patch.
It remains unclear how many players were directly affected by ARC Raiders cheaters exploiting this specific oversight. On one hand, the fact that the exploit became widespread enough to appear on Twitch suggests it had been active for some time. On the other, given the game’s broader cheating issues, distinguishing this particular exploit from others using publicly available data is difficult, if not impossible. As for Embark Studios, the developer is reportedly still reimbursing players for items lost in matches involving confirmed cheaters. However, this compensation appears inconsistent and depends on the studio’s ability to identify offenders after the fact.
Source: MP1st