TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 1,961
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Bungie still hasn't acknowledged that it happened, though, which is a little strange.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
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.
pic.twitter.com/mTGwEwSi2hFebruary 26, 2026
So it's fixed, I guess, but it's not en...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
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.
pic.twitter.com/mTGwEwSi2hFebruary 26, 2026
So it's fixed, I guess, but it's not en...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?