Arc Raiders Frozen Trail is the biggest update yet and a “2.0” milestone for the game, developer Embark Studios says.
Embark buries the lede in a press release covering today’s Frozen Trail reveal. “ARC Raiders’ Frozen Trail 2.0 update will be available on October 8,” it reads.
Arc Raiders only just released update 1.47.0. The jump to 2.0 is significant, marking a new era for the game with implications of a soft relaunch. Many players were hoping for a major shift after several quiet months saw the game slow and deflate after an enormous launch last year.
There’s a lot in Frozen Trail: a big new map, four new Arcs, two new guns, 15 weapons updated with wild customization options, an Outpost base to decorate, skill tree changes, and quite a bit more.
Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal discussed the scope of the update and Embark’s plans for the future at a preview event attended by GamesRadar+.
“We’re finalizing the update, I think the team is kind of sitting here working on that today,” he says. “We have the end of polish today, which means that most of the things needs to be done today, so I think they’re a bit stressed out. Things are looking good, though, and I think if you take a look at where we were when we did the monthly updates and where we are today, we feel a lot better about what we’re putting out and what quality we’re putting into the updates. I think the team feels good about that.
“Of course, it’s scary every time we do a big update. To me, the best way to describe it is that it almost feels like we’re shipping the game again because I kind of get flashbacks to last year when we were in this very same position trying to make the game complete. So it becomes almost scarier in a way because the updates are larger and more complicated to execute. But overall I think the team is pretty happy and excited to share what we’ve been working on for, basically, since May of this year, and I’m also excited.”
Under Arc Raiders’ new update cadence, we’re now looking at roughly one Frozen Trail-sized update every six months. “That is approximately what we’re targeting,” Grøndal affirms. “We haven’t really set the dates for our next update yet, but we have planned it out, and we are starting the work on that.
“I think we want to keep that to roughly about the same as we said. That’s the plan so far, and hopefully we can take great learnings from looking at how the reception is with Frozen Trail, and also include some learnings there [for] the next update. So we are feeling good about it.”