Embark has yet to reveal the roadmap for Arc Raiders' next year of updates, but it has done the next best thing: vaguely allude to what's to come in an interview. That'd be a recent interview with GamesRadar+, in which design lead Virgil Watkins dished about a variety of topics, including maps.
"There are going to be multiple maps coming this year, and I think it's going to be across a spectrum of size to try to facilitate different types of gameplay," Watkins said. "So you might see some that are smaller, and you might see some that are even grander than what we've got now."
Arc Raiders' existing world map and in-game hints suggest a few of the locales we could see in 2026: a settlement closer to that intimidating volcano, and a toxic swamp. Or maybe those will just be modifiers applied to existing maps, but Watkins' main point is that Embark isn't interested in adding maps just to have new places to do the same old thing.
"The ambition is to try to pair it 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 also helps, Watkins added, when a new map coalesces around a unified theme.
"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. 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.'"
He gave Stella Montis as a prime example: dark, dank, and more deliriously violent than the four launch maps. That map's exploration of indoor-only gameplay and map-exclusive Arc bots gets the mind racing about what other extremes future maps could hold: a block of highrise towers connected by ziplines, a desert with underground fast travel, maybe a giant flying Arc you can enter and loot?
Watkins avoided specifics of course, but he did indicate a full roadmap would be coming "sometime soon."
