Arc Raiders’ titular ARC enemies are thrilling mainstays of the extraction shooter’s terrifying sandbox, but that sandbox is set to expand with future updates.
After hitting 12 million players in just a single month, Embark Studios has announced that multiple new maps will be coming to Arc Raiders over the course of 2026. However, the game will also receive brand-new enemies, and new guns to shake up the current best weapons available right now.
Arc Raiders actually added its first new enemy last year with the arrival of the Shredder in Stella Montis. The Shredder is a floating ARC that roams the halls of Stella Montis and fires bursts of shrapnel at players. It’s a deadly enemy that is exclusive to the map.
However, in a recent chat with GamesRadar, design lead Virgil Watkins confirmed that the Shredder will escape the bounds of Stella Montis and join other maps. While the game’s lore introduced the enemy as a patrol guard for the Stella Montis facility, it will find its way into other maps in the future.
“I think it is a promise,” Watkins said. “They’ll figure out how to get out of there eventually.”
Watkins didn’t confirm when the Shredder will escape or where it will escape to, but it’s clear that nothing is stagnant in the Arc Raiders universe. After all, as per the game’s intro, the ARCs are constantly evolving—that’s why we will continue to see new, deadlier enemies as the game gets more updates.
With this in mind, the opposite is also true: enemies that are currently not present in Stellar Montis could also make their way there. Arc Raiders is an evolving game and future updates could see brand-new enemies and even variants of existing ones popping up wherever Embark pleases, and then shifting to other biomes when needed.
In the same interview, Watkins confirmed that “simple variants…have their place, but we want to make sure that they are actually serving a purpose in the ecosystem we have”. So, when the Shredder does depart Stella Montis for pastures new, will it be the exact same enemy? Or will it have some new additions as it finds freedom across Blue Gate?
