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servers

Arc Raiders’ devs would you like you to slam its servers with one last, open to all tech test next month

by admin September 23, 2025

With Marathon having received an indefinite delay back in June, that just leaves one game to test whether extraction shooters can make it mainstream: Arc Raiders. While this one has been cooking for a while now, it actually has a release date, October 30th. There’s been a few tests along the way, and it turns out the devs have one last one in them!

The good thing about this test – they’re calling it a Server Slam – is that it’s completely open to everyone. You don’t need any kind of access code, and despite this announcement coming with the shooter’s pre-order trailer, you do not in fact have to pre-order it either. This test is taking place between October 17th and 19th, across PC and console, and essentially it’s just to get as many people playing as possible to ensure there are no server hiccups when the game actually launches.

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Apparently this test will take place on the Dam Battlegrounds map for those in the know, and you’ll be able to get a taste of the game’s progression, crafting, and quest systems. It’s worth noting that none of this progress will carry over to the full game, so don’t get too deep into it. You’ll get a backpack cosmetic as a little treat in the full game for your troubles at least.

I’ve said it before on this site and I’ll say it again, I’m not particularly big on shooters, but I’m always curious about a burgeoning genre or subgenre. Sure extraction shooters aren’t exactly new, but they are quite hard to recommend given how easy it can be to lose progress. Not sure if I’ll be jumping in at launch, though I’ll be keeping my eye on it to see how things go at least.

Arc Raiders is out October 30th.

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September 23, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Blizzard filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against one of World of Warcraft’s biggest private servers, but the team behind it is putting on a brave face: ‘Challenges come to us often, and each time we are prepared to face them’

by admin September 1, 2025

If you’ve played an MMO for very long, you’ve almost certainly heard the siren song of the private server. These fan-operated servers come in all varieties—some keep dead games alive, some provide a window to a past build of an aging game, and some have even gotten the green light to keep going from the game’s publisher.

Historically, Blizzard has not been so keen on this practice which, in all fairness, involves making big parts of its game playable for free. Its action against Nostalrius, a server that took World of Warcraft back to a 2006 build before that option existed officially, is one of the more notorious private server closures in history.

There’s nothing new under the sun, as Turtle WoW—a private server that launched in 2018 and has reached concurrent player peaks of over 70,000 since, according to its developers—was named in a complaint Blizzard filed Friday that claims the Turtle WoW team has “built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard’s intellectual property.”

The Turtle WoW build is an altered version of 2006-era WoW offering new playable races, zones, instances, and so on. While it is free to play, it also has an in-game shop that allows donations to the dev team to be converted into store currency. But the more pressing issue is obviously the whole copyright infringement thing, which the lawsuit hammers home hard.

The complaint continues: “These unauthorized private servers drive away otherwise dedicated WoW players, introduce security risks to players, fragment the WoW player community, and create confusion as to what are official, supported

versions of WoW … private servers such as Turtle WoW also encourage and facilitate video game piracy by allowing players to avoid paying for the game experience that Blizzard has invested so much time and money to create.”

Turtle WoW wasn’t exactly in hiding. You may have seen its advertisements on YouTube or on X, where it regularly teases major updates and its impending move to Unreal Engine 5. The team recently launched a new realm, Ambershire, which itself hit an early peak of over 11,000 online players. These are the sort of numbers and ambitions that some officially active MMOs can’t match.

On the server’s fan Discord, team member Torta issued a statement the day after the suit was filed: “Turtle WoW is here to stay. Challenges come to us often, and each time we are prepared to face them. We remain fully committed to delivering the Turtle WoW experience that you’ve come to love over the years.”

As a lifelong fan of “vanilla” World of Warcraft who watched Turtle WoW’s development with great interest, it hurts to see so much passionate work and modding ingenuity get tangled in a legal mess. On the other hand, Blizzard has already proven itself litigious with this sort of thing, and it’s hard to say how the team will keep it going. Private servers have a way of persevering for exactly as long as they can evade the wrong attention.

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September 1, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Battlefield 6 is getting persistent servers, and two vehicle-heavy maps are coming in the next Labs playtest

by admin August 30, 2025

Battlefield 6’s open beta may be over, Battlefield 2042 might also have been transformed into Battlefield 6, but there must be more battles in the fields of six, so sign-ups for another round of Labs testing are now open. Two fresh maps with plenty of room for vehicle-based fisticuffs will be on offer, as well as a chance to check out the server browser that may well be chock full of 24/7 scraps once the final game launches.

EA have wheeled out all of this info in two separate blog posts, which follow neatly on from them running down all of their learnings from the open beta.

First of all, the two maps. Operation Firestorm and Mirak Valley are set to debut, and if you were among the many miffed at the open beta largely sticking to smaller maps, you’ll be glad to hear that they facilitate larger scraps with “a diverse range of vehicles, from quad bikes to tanks and aircraft”.

As you might expect, their inclusion’s part of EA working to ensure “balancing occurs across different-sized environments” following the open beta. “Improvements to weapons, large-scale vehicular combat, gadget balancing, and more” are all on the publisher’s radar to monitor and tweak. This round of testing’ll also be used to lock in “the official setting for Hardcore mode”, so put on your best killing pants.

If you hop into this latest Labs test, you’ll also get your first chance to muck around with a work-in-progress version of Battlefield 6’s server browser. Its features will be “intentionally limited” so EA can focus on making sure it’s stable and useable at a basic level. Basically, making sure folks can set up a server via a shortcode, fill out its description and tags, then host away trouble-free as other players join and leave.

Those who’ve grown up jumping into 24/7 servers that serve you one map on repeat and don’t disappear when everyone goes to bed at the end of the first day will be glad to know EA have confirmed custom servers will be persistent. It won’t cost you any extra over the base price of the FPS either, which is a nice bit of non-money-grabbing from EA, and should mean Battlefield 6 has less trouble establishing a strong sense of community out of the gate.

If you’ve not taken part in any Battlefield 6 Labs tests to this point, you can head here to sign up. Though, there’s no guarantee you’ll be granted access either right away or at all, as the spots are much more limted than the open beta.

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August 30, 2025 0 comments