Embark says the ‘pressure of a monthly cycle’ is holding Arc Raiders back, so it’s slowing down: Major updates will come every 6 months from now on

Embark is slowing down the live service treadmill for Arc Raiders. The hit extraction shooter will now receive major updates twice a year. That’s in contrast to its current run of monthly updates, which have been hit or miss in the seven months since launch.

Arc Raiders’ bi-annual updates will be “larger in scale, more impactful, with the goal to genuinely change how you play the game,” according to a blog post penned by executive producer Aleksander Grøndal.

“When Arc Raiders launched, we planned to offer monthly updates. The intention was to keep you all engaged, to ensure the game always felt fresh, and to give you reasons to keep braving topside. But once the game was in players’ hands, we saw that the kind of long-term experience we want to create for Arc Raiders requires more transformative updates.”

Arc Raiders will not go dark in the months between milestone additions: a dedicated “live service team” will continue to deliver “regular live updates,” cosmetics, balance changes, bug fixes, and in-game events. In the post, Grøndal says its current schedule makes it impossible to pursue larger changes the game needs.

“Some of the progression improvements we want to implement simply need more development time that we haven’t been able to address properly while running on a monthly cycle. Moving to larger updates allows us to spend more time refining the systems players engage with the most,” Grøndal wrote.

The first test of Arc Raiders’ new cadence will be Frozen Trail, a major update planned for October that Embark says is its biggest yet:

• A Sprawling New Frontier: Explore a new landscape in the Rust Belt with layered design and new mysteries to uncover in the largest map in the game.
• Our Most Ambitious ARC Operation So Far: Including new ARC enemies with fresh designs, and unique behaviors that will challenge Raiders in new ways.
• New Systems of Progression: Many players have maxed out their Raider Den and hit the Skill Point ceiling. Frozen Trail will introduce new goals and more ways to shape your Raider’s progression.
• Exploring the origin of Arc: What are Arc and where do they come from? Frozen Trail gives Raiders the opportunity to begin uncovering that mystery.
• Improved Skill Tree
• Alongside new weapons, items, instruments, cosmetics and more

That’s exciting stuff, but it’s also five months away.

In the short term, Embark is also introducing a new nomadic trader that offers unique rewards and cosmetics in exchange for high-value items. The trader is a targeted response to “a few common problems” that Embark is monitoring:

• You’re holding a lot of high-value items with no way to offload them in rewarding ways.
• Your Stash is filling up with the game’s new items and we haven’t increased the capacity.
• Very few of you are going on the Expedition, either because it is not rewarding enough, or because it is too painful to part with your favorite items and Blueprints.

While larger changes to the Expeditions system are in the works, the nomadic trader will offer a perk that allows players to carry five items over with them into the next Expedition (including blueprints).

I’ve been away from Arc Raiders for months now, but we have several PC Gamer staffers still playing daily. I solicited editorial director Tim Clark’s reaction to the news:

“I can tell you that with my many thousands of hours in Destiny 2 I could see this coming a mile off. Some players genuinely don’t understand how hard the process of producing new high-fidelity assets and animation are, let alone complex systems that require testing. The monthly cadence never looked sustainable, and the thinness of those updates was seen in the increasingly grumpy playerbase.

“But October now looks an awful long way off, and Frozen Trails will have to blow people’s minds if Arc is to avoid falling into the same trap as so many live service games that have struggled to keep their audiences sated with new stuff to do.”

The trajectory of Arc Raiders mirrors the ways people are playing it. Embark began with a roadmap that fit the blueprint of PvP-focused shooters, but many players have glommed onto its MMO qualities as a highlight: social collaboration, grinding, and completionism. As Tim says, it has a lot more in common with Destiny than Call of Duty. Arc Raiders does not call for updates—it demands expansions.