Buoyed by a launch wave that surpassed 12 million players in a few months, Arc Raiders developer Embark is preparing a suite of new content for its 2026 roadmap to diversify the game in the year ahead.
Asked about Embark's target cadence for releasing new content like maps, weapons, objectives, and enemies, design lead Virgil Watkins tells GamesRadar+ that "sometime soon, I believe we're going to be putting out a chunk of a roadmap for the upcoming months. But right now, it's us kind of deciding exactly that cadence, that stuff. And you are correct on the types of content, and we're going to parcel that out across the coming year."
"Some of it is reacting to the things you're talking about here, like how players are actually engaging with the game and the things that they're doing, but a lot of it for us is trying to see how we can move the experience forward," he continues. "Of course adding a new map has its own novelty, and it's a new place to play and do that. But what else? Thematically, gameplay-wise. How do the enemies and the items and the experiences in that map all point toward something? It's kind of getting that thematically cohesive stuff together that feels like, 'Oh, guys, the Whatever Update just came out for Arc Raiders. Let's go check that out.' That's what we're trying to template out for the coming months."
Watkins couldn't share many specifics, and we're still awaiting that roadmap at the time of writing, but he did discuss Embark's broader ambitions for new Arc Raiders maps. (Just recently, we've seen traces of a new "toxic swamp" map event.) I asked if the team is currently most interested in creating maps as large as Blue Gate, or more congested ones like Stella Montis, the most recently added map.
"It's funny you bring up Blue Gate, because if you look at the actual land area, it's not the biggest, but it feels huge, which I think is a fun quirk of how the layout and things came together," Watkins reasons. "Spaceport, if you talk about pure land area and available play space, that is the biggest. I think Spaceport is something like 1.6 by 1.4 kilometers, whereas Buried City and Blue Gate are about one by one. But obviously they have different densities on the inside, so that becomes a bit hard to calculate.
Looking at future maps, he says "the ambition is to try to pair it with some new type of experience, whether that's the map conditions or weather conditions we put in that make the play feel different, enemy types or compositions feeling different, or we're escalating the types of loot available there. Stella Montis was a big jump up in new, rarer tech and some new blueprints and things that can drop, and just offering new types of experiences. The Shredder, for example, is an enemy that currently only appears in Stella Montis.
"How do we keep – not necessarily escalating all the time, but – giving you a new way of play, a new way to approach, making you make different decisions with things you've already been using in one context, and trying to use it in a different way in another context? And providing more options for the player, like, can zip lines now be used in this way? Or now I have a far greater user for things like mines and noise makers because of the way this level is and plays, things like that."
Watkins is firm on one key point: "There are going to be multiple maps coming this year, and I think it's going to be across a spectrum of size to try to facilitate different types of gameplay. So you might see some that are smaller, and you might see some that are even grander than what we've got now."
Stella Montis is a labyrinth of hallways and locked rooms that seems designed to stoke the fires of PvP (though, as ever, many players refuse to be the bad guy). I asked Watkins if Embark is consciously leaning into that, and how we might see future maps balance the vibe of PvE versus PvP-leaning spaces.
"That's certainly a consideration that goes into it," he says. "When you create a dense interior that's sort of spider nest-y, it's going to evoke that, right? Certainly, the style of play, or the predominant play that's going to happen there, is a factor in that."
That is, of course, just one lever Embark can pull when building out a new map. "Then we're going through considerations of practical stuff like server performance," Watkins adds. "We can have X players and arc present before the server explodes and we can't run anymore. So that influences some of our choice making. And client performance. Dam [Battlegrounds], for example, is kind of right up to the line for performance because it has some pretty far vistas, and it's also very dense and quite complicated in terms of the number of props and actors and buildings and stuff there.
"Those are the practical side of things, and then it's just getting into the pacing territory. How many spawns can we have? What's their time to travel? How quickly do they collapse different locations? What's the density of drones and players in any given spot, and loot dispersion and value concentration? That's a bunch of stuff that comes into play when we put these spaces together."
