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Embark has ambitious plans for Arc Raiders as it enters its first full year of support. While the developer hasn’t shared all of its intentions for the next 12 months, design director Virgil Watkins has teased that a new roadmap for 2026 will be revealed soon. Although the roadmap has yet to be shared, Watkins suggests that the coming year will include the release of multiple new maps, including some that are “grander than what we’ve got right now”.
Regarding the upcoming roadmap, Watkins tells GamesRadar that “sometime soon, I believe we’re going to be putting out a chunk of a roadmap for the upcoming months”. As for what content players can expect, Watkins primarily teases new maps, adding to the current selection of Dam Battlegrounds, Acerra Spaceport, Buried City, Blue Gate, and, added in November 2025, Stella Montis.
Looking ahead, Watkins explains that the team’s “ambition is to try to pair [new maps] with some new type of experience, whether that’s map conditions or weather conditions… enemy types or compositions… or escalating the types of loot available there”. Watkins points to Stella Montis an example, noting that it “was a big jump up in new, rarer tech,” and that “the Shredder is an enemy that currently only appears in Stella Montis”.
Watkins also shares that “there are going to be multiple maps coming this year, and I think it’s going to be across a spectrum of sizes to facilitate different types of gameplay”. This means some upcoming maps will be smaller, while others will be “grander than what we’ve got now”.
Finally, Watkins discusses some of the design limitations Embark must consider when creating new maps. These include “practical stuff like server performance” and “client performance,” noting that Dam Battlegrounds is “kind of right up to the line for performance because it has some pretty far vistas and is very dense and quite complicated in terms of the number of props, actors, and buildings”.
As we await the reveal of a new roadmap hopefully soon, there is currently a Toxic Swamp condition event to anticipate for January 19.
Arc Raiders has been a major success since launching on October 30, 2025. The game has sold over 12 million copies, and as part of update 1.11.0, Embark has released a free Gilded Pickaxe as a thank-you gift to players.
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