The most dangerous thing in Arc Raiders is a ladder that leads to nowhere: ‘My whole squad was wiped’

I spent most of my weekend playing Arc Raiders, navigating the weird social relationships that come with trying to convince someone not to kill you, running away from that goddamn Leaper, and finding my arch-nemesis in the form of a random ladder in Dam Battlegrounds.

If you’ve spent any time in Embark Studio’s latest extraction shooter, then you too may appreciate just how chaotic a run can get, and how you can trust absolutely nothing once you go topside, a lesson I wish I had learned sooner. But no, I and PC Gamer guides writer Rory Norris found out the hard way.

The highest building in Arc Raiders’ Dam Battlegrounds map is the Control Tower, and climbing to the top lets you get a pretty great scope of everything going on. From there, Rory and I could see everything we should avoid: a Rocketeer attacking a couple of poor raiders, what we were pretty sure was a Leaper, and the quickly descending Arc Orbiter. Did I mention we only had a few minutes left to extract?

While there is a way to survive the blast, we didn’t want to take any chances, so our next objective was to get to the Red Lakes Balcony Lift as fast as possible. We had two options: go back the way we came, or just use this conveniently placed ladder. The only problem was, the ladder led to nowhere.

For some twisted reason, this ladder on the side of the Control Tower just stops halfway, leaving you to drop through midair before bouncing off the side of the building to your death. It was a pretty embarrassing way to go out, with the only silver lining being that we weren’t the only ones to fall victim to this ladder.

Note to self: don’t trust the ladders from r/ArcRaiders

PC Gamer’s senior guides writer Sean Martin also got merc’d by it over the weekend, and with a full inventory to boot, having just pilfered the locked loot room at the top of the tower. Since then, I’ve seen tons of poor unsuspecting players fall, quite literally, into this trap. “Note to self: don’t trust the ladders,” player _Jent says on the Arc Raiders subreddit. “Thought I was gonna make a quick getaway out of the tower… guess technically I did.”

Others have reported total team wipes from this ladder, while some managed to survive the drop, somehow, but were then stuck on another very high roof. The worst part is that it actually looks like you could maybe drop off the ladder and slide down the dam, but instead, you just crumple into a ragdoll bouncing off concrete.

I can’t even imagine how many lives this ladder has taken. All any of us can really do at this point is just share the word and warn others about the killer ladder that’ll send players back to Speranza with nothing.