Arc Raiders is moving to a new update cadence that will see Embark Studios making larger updates to the game “every six months or so,” executive producer Aleksander Grondal told GameSpot in a recent interview. The game’s first six months have been hugely successful, with Grondal admitting the team was “a bit caught off guard” by the attention the game received from players and, in turn, the demands the studio faced early on.
“It’s a luxury problem, right?” Grondal said. “It’s not something to complain about. In that sense, it was, of course, great, but also getting this amount of eyes on your game also puts a lot of attention on some of the problems that the game is having. [It] kind of got a little bit in our way, to be honest with you, because we were kind of focusing on what was next, and we had to spend quite a lot of time with some technical things that we had to deal with. And, I mean, that’s the right call, obviously. That’s not the point. I think we were a bit caught off guard.
“When we shipped the game, we had this idea that we wanted to do monthly content updates, which is a pretty ambitious plan, to be honest with you. We’re not the largest team in the world, so we really work hard to get something out,” Grondal continued. “Then we ran out of some of the [early] initiatives that we did, and now we had to work on a month-to-month cadence, which means, practically speaking, there’s not that much production time on the features for the things we’re doing. Putting out content updates every month, I think the ambition was great to keep people engaged and interested. I think, though–and the community and the players are telling us the same–that they feel like some of these updates aren’t really hitting the mark in terms of what they want, in terms of impact. And we as a team feel that as well, but we’re not really able to take our ideas all the way through what we want them to be and also [determine] how they can drive the most meaningful impact to the players. So this cadence has kind of worked a bit against us to some degree.”
The next update, Frozen Trail, is planned for October. Frozen Trail is said to be the game’s biggest update so far, including a massive new map, multiple new Arc enemies, more endgame progression systems, additional story quests, an “improved skill tree,” as well as new weapons, items, cosmetics, and more.
In a blog post, Grondal went further into why the team believes this change is for the better, saying, “It’s important to understand, we’re not just stacking new content on top of the existing experience. We’re refining core systems to support a more meaningful long-term experience–one you genuinely want to keep returning to.”
Grondal told GameSpot that, though the team is adopting this semi-annual cadence for major updates, the game will still be supported in between, too. “We will continue doing bug fixes and quality-of-life [updates], running events, and tweaking and balancing will continue as we’re doing it today, but we will take some more time to build more impactful features. Basically, this means that we can do, I think, more exciting things with the game, longer-term.”
Arc Raiders is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.