It’s official: It’s totally fair game to blame your graphics settings when you get sniped out of nowhere in Arc Raiders.
You can blame it on the bushes that failed to hide your position against players who have found out that your graphics settings can be a slight competitive advantage. It wasn’t that you were crouched in the middle of nowhere with absolutely zero cover. Definitely not.
If you play enough competitive shooters, you’ll learn pretty quickly about the tricks graphics settings can play on you. Arc Raiders is the newest shooter with a foliage problem and you might not realize it’s holding you back—especially if you’re a sweaty PvPer.
Knee-high bushes and other shrubbery can be toggled on or off through the foliage graphics setting, and you probably want it on “low”. YouTuber staycation provides a good example of the difference with some bushes around a car. With the “epic” setting, the bushes obscure some of the ground around the edges of the car, which could make it hard to see someone at a distance. The lowest setting gets rid of them entirely, giving you a clean view to line up a shot or catch someone hiding.
Notably, the foliage setting doesn’t seem to affect the big bushes you can hide in. It’s only the small stuff that would matter in visually cluttered parts of the environment. Technically, it could be the difference between getting shot or not even though it looks like a rather minimal change.
It helps that Arc Raiders is a third-person game. I think the issue is a little worse in FPS games because you don’t have a way of turning your camera to see around objects without exposing yourself. That said, it’s still something that should probably be changed so that there’s zero advantage to playing on a low-end PC, or a console for that matter.
Given how surprisingly friendly people are in Arc Raiders, it’s kind of funny to see some of the reactions to this discovery. I’m not sure PvP is “doomed” because of this because I’m not sure the game lives and dies on PvP alone, but it would be nice to know everyone is on an even playing field.
