ARC Raiders fixed a lot in Riven Tides, then broke the one feature matchmaking needed

ARC Raiders just shipped a meaningful seasonal update and immediately kneecapped one of the systems a multiplayer extraction game cannot afford to fumble: crossplay. Patch 1.26.0, the Riven Tides update, rolled out with a new map, new threats, and the usual balance churn. It also disabled crossplay for a lot of players across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, locking people into platform-specific matchmaking and, in practice, making queues worse right when the patch should have been concentrating the player base instead of splitting it.

That is the real story. Not that a patch had a bug. Live games ship bugs all the time. The problem is which bug this was. In a game that depends on healthy matchmaking, crossplay is not a quality-of-life option sitting off to the side. It is part of the plumbing. When that breaks on update day, the rest of the patch has to fight uphill for player goodwill.

The workaround exists, but it is exactly the kind players hate

Embark acknowledged the issue on the official ARC Raiders Discord shortly after players started reporting that the crossplay toggle had effectively stopped working after 1.26.0. The studio said it was investigating and provided a temporary fix: restore all in-game settings to default.

Yes, that can re-enable crossplay. No, it is not a good solution.

Resetting everything to default means sacrificing every custom configuration you have built up: controller settings, sensitivity, keybind preferences, accessibility tweaks, audio mix, graphics adjustments, the works. For some players, that is an annoyance. For others, especially on PC or for anyone who has spent time dialing in a setup that actually feels right, it is enough to justify waiting for a proper fix instead. Embark reportedly advised exactly that for players who do not want to lose their settings.

This is where the usual “there’s a workaround” language starts sounding more helpful than it really is. A workaround that asks players to wipe their config is not a clean bypass. It is damage control. Necessary, maybe. Convenient, absolutely not.

Why this bug matters more than the patch notes suggest

Riven Tides was supposed to be a momentum patch. Background reporting around the update points to a substantial content drop: a new coastal map with more verticality, the ARC Turbine threat, new gear, map conditions, and broader balance changes. That is the sort of update meant to pull lapsed players back in and give the active crowd something fresh to chew on.

Instead, the first practical question many players had to ask was whether they could still squad up across platforms. That is not a small perception problem. It changes how the patch lands.

Multiplayer communities are fragile in very specific ways. You can get away with a rough balance pass for a few days. You can survive one overtuned weapon or a buggy event trigger. What you do not want is to fracture the matchmaking pool, especially in a game where healthy queue times and mixed-platform population help smooth out the inevitable spikes and dips after a major update. Crossplay exists partly for convenience, but mostly for population health. When it disappears, the game becomes narrower overnight.

That is the uncomfortable observation the patch notes will not say out loud: this bug did not just inconvenience social groups. It undercut the update’s core job, which was to make the game feel fuller, busier, and worth logging back into.

The real issue is not the mistake. It is the fallback plan.

Embark deserves credit for acknowledging the problem quickly. Fast confirmation is better than the usual industry routine where studios go suspiciously quiet while players perform unpaid QA on social media. But acknowledgment and recovery are different things.

The question a player should be asking here is simple: how did a major social and matchmaking setting get disabled so broadly, and why is the immediate player-facing recovery path a full settings reset? That points to a configuration-level failure with a pretty clumsy escape hatch. It does not automatically mean Embark is careless. It does suggest the patch pipeline let a critical multiplayer dependency break in a way that was not gracefully reversible from the client side.

That distinction matters because it tells you what to watch next. A fast hotfix solves the immediate pain. It does not by itself answer whether Embark has the kind of release process that can catch this class of bug before it hits everyone at once.

Reporting around the issue has pointed to a follow-up hotfix, widely referred to as 1.26.1, as the expected permanent repair. That lines up with how studios usually handle a targeted post-patch correction like this. But until Embark publishes the fix and players verify that crossplay is restored without nuking settings, “expected” is still the operative word.

What players actually need answered now

The useful information is straightforward. If crossplay is currently broken for you after 1.26.0, the known temporary workaround is to restore all settings to default. If you do that, plan on rebuilding your preferred setup manually. If you would rather not lose those custom configurations, the smarter move is to wait for the proper patch.

The less useful part is the vague language that usually surrounds these incidents. “We’re investigating” is fine for the first hour. After that, players need specifics:

• Is the bug affecting all platforms equally, or are some hit harder?
• Will the permanent fix preserve existing settings?
• Is there any risk of the crossplay state reverting again after restart or future updates?
• When exactly is the hotfix scheduled to deploy?

Those are not edge-case questions. They are the practical checklist for anyone deciding whether to reset now or wait.

What to watch next

The next signal that matters is not another Discord reassurance. It is the release of the hotfix itself, likely labeled 1.26.1, followed by confirmation from players on all three platforms that crossplay works normally again without forcing a settings wipe. After that, the second thing worth watching is whether Embark explains the failure in patch notes or a follow-up message. Studios do not need to write a postmortem for every bug, but when the issue hits matchmaking and social play this directly, a little technical clarity goes a long way.

Until then, Riven Tides is stuck in the annoying category of updates that add good reasons to come back while sabotaging the easiest way to enjoy them with friends. That is fixable. It also should have been caught before launch.