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The 2026 roadmap has already brought considerable change to Arc Raiders, bringing an invasion of birds, more modes, and two new Epic augments. In an interview with Embark Studios, we raised the question of creating another set of weapons, to continue ramping up the extraction shooter, and apparently it's not out of the realm of possibility.
"I think that's completely possible," Virgil Watkins, design lead on Arc Raiders, tells GamesRadar+ on the possibility of getting legendary guns. "But the way guns are relative to each other, that's where we have to be quite careful, and that's why we deliberately did things like that with the Hullcracker and the Equalizer."
Watkins can see the desire to enhance the raider-on-raider scuffles, but he's "very staunchly" sticking to one rule: "There should never be a one-shot situation if you're wearing a shield and have full health. I think that gameplay is deeply boring, to just be deleted in an instant, in our type of game."
He definitely has a point. One-shotting gets old fast, and you can create a hierarchy that punishes those who don’t play as much without meaning to if the balance is off kilter too much.
"If we were to do something that is substantially stronger in PvP, it needs to come with the appropriate price tag, running costs, risk," he adds. "I'm not in any way against players having that spike in power and feeling very cool for a moment. But it can't be like, I unlocked this thing and now I just win fights."
He gives an example of the heavy shield during Tech Test 2, where it made people more or less unstoppable for a considerable length of time. If such power is attainable, it needs to be quite restrained. For now, the Arc Raiders playerbase isn't calling out for such things, but who knows where we’ll be later in the year.
