ARC Raiders devs admit they're pushing the limits of performance. Still, they're working on even bigger maps
The Embark Studios team may soon reveal ARC Raiders' development plans for 2026. For now, they have summarized the Cold Snap winter event.
Winter statistics have revealed not only the winter enthusiasm of ARC Raiders players but also the number of casualties caused by snowball wars (and Jack Frost). Soon, we will also learn about the first development plans for the game in 2026.
The Cold Snap update has spiced things up in Embark's shooter game by adding snowy landscapes as a new map modifier, just like the name suggests. Now that the in-game event has ended, the developer has decided to summarize the event with a new infographic.
Deadly frost and snowball victories
From this image (published on X), we learn that the frosty climate change alone contributed to players being knocked down 3.5 million times.
Less effective but still deadly were the snowballs. Although "only" 91 players were knocked down by snowballs (which is impressive since they dealt 1 point of damage), over 10,000 ARCs were defeated with them. However, this required throwing 95 million snowballs. Fortunately, it was very cheap ammunition.
The players really got into the holiday spirit by throwing a million feasts using candleberries, and they managed to gather 179 million of them. Additionally, 2.9 million fireworks were set off, and 9.2 million firecrackers were thrown. Moreover, 108 players demonstrated a knack for music by playing their instruments for at least 20 minutes without interruption.
Source: Embark Studios / X.
ARC Raiders in 2026
Since winter in ARC Raiders is now behind us, the question is: what's next? This question was raised in an interview by Games Radar with the lead designer Virgil Watkins. The creator hinted that we will likely learn a significant part of the roadmap for early 2026 "quite soon."
...sometime soon, I believe we're going to be putting out a chunk of a roadmap for the upcoming months. But 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.
Although the team is officially still working out these "other details," Watkins admitted that one of the new features will be additional maps, including some that will be even larger than the current ones. We also know that there are plans to add a toxic swamp as a new location. Overall, the designer says that Embark Studios wants to bring some fresh experiences with ARC Raiders, especially when it comes to the environment, enemies, and loot.
Of course, the team has to keep an eye on the tech stuff, like server performance. As the creator put it, there's only so many players and massive ARCs a server can handle before it "blows up" and stops working. The same applies to players' hardware.
Then we're going through considerations of practical stuff like server performance. We can have X players and arc present before the server explodes and we can't run anymore. So that influences some of our choice making. And client performance. Dam [Battlegrounds], for example, is kind of right up to the line for performance because it has some pretty far vistas, and it's also very dense and quite complicated in terms of the number of props and actors and buildings and stuff there.
Those are the practical side of things, and then it's just getting into the pacing territory. How many spawns can we have? What's their time to travel? How quickly do they collapse different locations? What's the density of drones and players in any given spot, and loot dispersion and value concentration? That's a bunch of stuff that comes into play when we put these spaces together.
Of course, the size of the maps is not everything. Watkins points out that Blue Gate is far from being the largest arena in ARC Raiders, yet journalist Austin Wood asked whether Embark Studios will create "equally large maps." It all comes down to how the space is used, and that's where the developer can really get creative. Let's hope we learn the details soon.
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Author: Jacob Blazewicz
Graduated with a master's degree in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw with a thesis dedicated to this very subject. Started his adventure with gamepressure.com in 2015, writing in the Newsroom and later also in the film and technology sections (also contributed to the Encyclopedia). Interested in video games (and not only video games) for years. He began with platform games and, to this day, remains a big fan of them (including Metroidvania). Also shows interest in card games (including paper), fighting games, soulslikes, and basically everything about games as such. Marvels at pixelated characters from games dating back to the time of the Game Boy (if not older).
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