Embark are continuing their meteorological experiments in extraction shooter Arc Raiders with a rousing injection of wind. There’s a hurricane coming to the game on February 24th, a new map condition that limits visibility, degrades shields, impedes movement, and makes you suck even more at shooting things. Still, this stormcloud has a few silver linings. With the gale at your back, you’ll naturally move a lot faster. Also, you may find it easier to avoid detection in the open if you disable your shield.

“The wind will change how you navigate topside,” explains an official site post. “When you have a tailwind, you’ll feel fast and nimble, but fighting against the gales will inhibit your speed and quickly drain your stamina. Throwables will also behave differently in these conditions, and it may take a while to master the trajectory of thrown items like grenades. Other aspects of gameplay like smoke, gas, and even jumping will be affected by the power of the Hurricane.”

The howling boreads will also steadily erode your shield, causing it to glitch and spark. This will make you more visible to other raiders through the murk, so you might want to turn it off. The steady mithering of the elements will also make it harder to see and hear Arc robots. It’s not entirely clear from the blog post if the likes of Wasps and Hornets will be whirled off course by the hurricane. Perhaps if we could work out the wind direction, we could set up a big net to catch them and then grenade them all in one go.

As ever with map-wide afflictions in Arc Raiders, peril brings plunder. The storm will reveal new caches of gear. Baby wanna new powercell? Out you go into the squall, then.

Off the top of my head, the only thing the Arc Raiders hurricane is missing is the opportunity to get lifted clean away Dorothy-style and land in a different map, perhaps even a different game. Picture a bunch of sky-tossed Raiders touching down on the sun-kissed isles of Animal Crossing, headshotting Tom Nook and stripping his cottage for parts. If you find Embark’s approach to live service updates too turbulent, I’m sorry to say that the studio have no plans to change how they rotate the map conditions.