It’s been a slow couple of months for Arc Raiders. New content has slowed to a trickle while player complaints keep piling up. That should all hopefully change with Riven Tides, the extraction shooter’s biggest update ever. It goes live on April 28. Here’s what it includes.
The main additions are a new map and a hulking new Arc Turbine enemy that floats in the sky. The map is set along a coastline and includes a resort and a dockyard to scavenge through. Tennis courts and lavish ballrooms lie abandoned and dilapidated as seagulls circle overhead. The collision of breezy vacationing and grim apocalypse offers some great initial vibes in the trailer:
What else is new in Riven Tides? There’s a new map condition that has players looking for buried treasure, a new expedition window, a five-stage raider project called Avian Alarm, a Last Resort Event for collecting ship models, and of course new items:
- Epic Gadget – Powered Descender
- Uncommon Throwable – Crash Mat
- Common Deployable – White Flag
- Common Gadget – Dockmaster’s Detector
Embark said it’s also trying to re-balance augments to make them all viable. “We are working on a general balancing pass for Augments to buff some of those that are underperforming, most especially the Combat Mk. 3 (Flanking) Augment which has yet to find its place to shine,” the patch notes read. “The developers are also taking a jackhammer to Arc Raiders‘ bloated weapon economy. Upgrading will be a little more generous but weapons will be rare along the outskirts of maps and break more easily.
“The weapon economy has increasingly started looking more and more unbalanced, where players engaging in heavy PVP have to make a lot of difficult decisions around their weapons while the most friendly players have ended up in a chronic state of weapon accumulation,” they write. “We want to balance this out so that all players are challenged by weapon attrition, as well as introducing new ways to combat it.”
Players are already furiously debating if this is the right way to deal with things. We’ll see how things settle out over the next few days.