It is a tale as old as time itself: a hack gets a third-person game to run in first-person, or vice-versa, and the result is unspeakable horror. Sometimes that horror comes from the monstrosities that result, but other times it can just be that the new perspective makes the game far more terrifying. It’s the latter that appears to apply for Arc Raiders, after someone managed to get the game running in first-person mode and discovered it became even more intense.
Via Polygon, Redditor Short_Satisfaction_9 showed off the results of his fiddling with Arc Raiders‘ console settings to force the game into a first-person perspective, and while the results are very janky-looking, they also show a version of the game where fighting is a far more frightening endeavor.
Arc Raiders’ combat is already very tough, even if you’re completely avoiding PvP antics. The game’s PvE bots and drones don’t go easy on you at the best of times, but in third-person you at least have the advantage of somewhat mystical vision of your surrounding area, able to see incoming enemies at a good distance. In first-person, however, that’s all gone. It sets you up for an awful lot more surprise attacks, and given how unbelievably worked up I get playing the game already, this really isn’t something I’d be clamoring for.
It’s also not something anyone else can do now, as Embark has just removed access to the in-game console. That’s for a good reason too—over the weekend, following complaints of widespread player cheating, many realized that the commands enabled PC players to switch off all fogging and thus increase visibility by a wild amount. Something Xbox and PS5 players could not, giving PC cross players a ridiculous advantage over both them and their fellow PC players who weren’t doing this.
On January 10, Embark’s community manager posted to the Discord to say that a hotfix was being rolled out to remove the “NewConsole” command, a vestige of its Unreal Engine basis that had accidentally been left in the game. That’s going to reduce an awful lot of cheating, but does mean the rest of us can’t experience the horror of a first-person view.
