The big Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update is finally here, dropping a truckload of wintry content on players and, importantly, unloading the biggest patch notes since the start of the game. We're all going to be busy with the new map, skills, guns, gadgets, and Arc for a good while, but the 2.0 Frozen Trail update is full of tiny yet exciting changes, many of which have been requested by players for nearly a full year.
You can read the full patch notes here. I want to focus on some easily missed lines that punch above their weight. Here's an easy crowd pleaser: "Max Stash Size increased by 2 new levels (328 Max without Expedition bonuses)." With tons of new items coming into the game, I wouldn't be surprised if Embark is all but forced to further increase stash size in the future.
This may be a contentious change because it's technically a nerf to a popular strategy, but the Queen and Matriarch have had their loot reallocated once again. "Moved higher tier loot from the armor pieces of the legs to the legs pieces for Queen and Matriarch," developer Embark says.
In other words, you can't just prune leg armor to plunder easy cores any longer. Instead, you'll seemingly have to sever legs entirely or stick around for the kill, which, really, is probably how it always should've worked. Destroying legs at the joint should be more rewarding than simply peeling them, but until now you'd get literally nothing from the leg frame. My inner loot goblin isn't happy, but this just makes sense to me. However, I still think a dead Queen or Matriarch should drop way more loot than a reactor that only one person gets to loot. We'll see how it plays out.
Another point of contention will be the handling of the Anvil hand cannon, which has been pushed to blue rarity as it was "outperforming weapons both within and above its own level of rarity." Once again, this makes sense to me. With an Anvil, a Renegade, and enough ammo, you can kill a machine god.
I'm a bigger fan of the little animations that Embark's added with Frozen Trail. "Added animations to show the player interacting with their map and inventory," the patch notes read. Additionally, there's now a "mouth animation for when players are talking in proximity chat." Other "contextual" character animations include "brushing dust after sliding" and heaving "when running out of breath for a while." Anything that makes my raider feel more like a fallible container of meat struggling in a cyborg apocalypse is welcome.
Here's Embark finally tackling something that always bothered me: "Adjusted how character sounds are occluded by walls and obstacles for more natural audio positioning." My hope is that this will improve Arc Raiders' directional audio, which could get wonky in firefights in some buildings.
The gameplay section of the patch is where the real gold lies. We've got "more contextual Ping information for ARC and various objects." When looting, you can "drop loot to the ground directly from containers." While crawling around, "you can now open the map while downed." If your backpack looks fabulous but has an extremely visible light source, you can now toggle it off to "go full stealth mode."
One of the new movement changes could interact with the updated skill tree, which pushes agility more heavily, in interesting ways: "Added Scrambling. Sprinting at steep slopes will allow you to scramble up them for a short time." Sandwiched between added wall run and mantling maneuvers, this might actually make a noticeable difference.
Embark mentions the dynamic loot zones it's testing in new map Pendola Pass, designed to make scavenging less repetitive match over match by changing loot hotspots. The exciting part here is what executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told me in a recent interview: assuming initial feedback and implementation for dynamic loot zones goes well, "it will be fairly straightforward for us to go back and reapply that to the existing maps as well." Even as a map event, I'd love to see old zones find a little more variety.
