Marathon looks pretty groovy, but it’s got one big problem and it goes by the name of Arc Raiders. Embark’s narrative-driven sci-fi extraction shooter is really good, and really popular, and it stole Marathon’s thunder in a big way—to the point that it influenced some of the design changes Bungie made to the game in its big rework last year. It’s kind of amusing then, that players in the weekend-long server slam playtest that kicked off today discovered that the phrase “Arc Raiders” was being censored in the game’s text chat.
I first ran across the issue in this Twitch clip posted by Lirik, which shows that both “Arc Raiders” and “Raiders” are replaced by the # sign when typed into the text chat box, even when the characters are widely spaced out. Other game names, including Highguard, Destiny, Call of Duty, and Escape From Tarkov, appear normally.
Just to be sure, we—by which I mean PC Gamer shooter hero Morgan Park—tried it, and confirmed that the words were in fact censored. Bungie ultimately fixed the issue, and funny as it is to imagine that it was intentional pettiness, it was very likely accidental.
When the same thing happened in Black Ops 7 in October 2025, for instance, Activision said it wasn’t being petty, it was merely a text filter error. A couple months prior to that, the EA App tripped over the same thing, and while I don’t think an official explanation for that one was ever provided, it was fixed quickly.
Now, is it odd that Arc Raiders would trip up multiple videogame chat filters like this? Maybe at first glance, but not really: Text filters on this scale are inevitably going to run on similar systems and databases. I’m not an expert in the field but I think that’s a far more likely explanation than EA, Activision, and Bungie all being so mad at Embark that they won’t even let players type the name in their games.
But then came an odd twist. When Jake Lucky posted a different clip showing the same thing happened on X, for instance, the Marathon Development Team responded with an image of the words “Arc Raiders” uncensored in the text box—and called the competing game “awesome,” to boot. Morgan subsequently confirmed that the problem has indeed gone away.
So it’s fixed, I guess, but it’s not entirely clear what happened, and that’s a little weird. The dev team did say in a separate post that it is “seeing reports of players’ names being changed to ‘Redacted’ inadvertently,” which could be related, but there’s been no further update at this point. I’ve reached out to Bungie for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
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