Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders has already added a single new map in the form of Stella Montis, but the popular extraction shooter is already prepared to add a handful of new playable maps throughout 2026.
With Arc Raiders devs working on incentivise expeditions to more players as well as introduce better balancing for weapon upgrade costs, the team is also hard at work to bring more content to the game to make sure players don’t get bored with the game.
While Embark Studios does not have an official 2026 roadmap for the game yet, design lead Virgil Watkins has explained that the studio will release a “chunk of the roadmap” in the near future. This means that Embark will not be revealing the entire year of content, but instead will release instalments of their plans as they also work to address issues.
“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,” the developer told GamesRadar in a recent interview.
As for what the game will be adding, Watkins focused mostly on new maps, saying that “there are going to be multiple new maps coming this year”, but players will likely have access to near features, weapons, gadgets and—of course—cosmetics as the title continues to evolve. Additionally, the developer teased that there will be smaller and larger maps across a spectrum of size with “some that are even grander than what we’ve got now”.
“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,” they said. “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.”
Map diversity is a key aspect of what Embark is trying to do with future Arc Raiders updates, and is something the team mightily accomplished with its free-to-play FPS game The Finals. Watkins said that new maps should be paired “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”.
It’s not about “escalating all time time”, making the game harder every time a new map drops, but creating a new experience. Maybe one map is filled with hyper-sensitive sound-detecting enemies, maybe another map is designed around cleverly using ziplines. Whatever the case, new maps will be designed to make players engage with Arc Raiders in new ways instead of following the standard gameplay formula.
While not confirmed by Watkins, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund has teased that more social features, such as trading, should be introduced in future updates. While we don’t know what updates are coming later in the year, we do know that a new Toxic Map condition is coming to Dam Battlegrounds in a close-approaching update.
