What Is Arc Raiders? Gameplay, Platforms and Season 2

Arc Raiders is a multiplayer extraction shooter from Stockholm-based Embark Studios, the team behind The Finals, in which small squads scavenge a robot-ravaged Earth for loot, fight off both a hostile machine army and rival players, and try to get out alive before time runs out. Released on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on October 30, 2025, it has grown into one of the most-played shooters of the past year, and on October 8, 2026, Embark shipped its biggest post-launch update yet, Frozen Trail, which is the closest thing the game has to a "Season 2."

What is Arc Raiders?

Arc Raiders is a third-person, session-based extraction shooter built in Unreal Engine 5. The game is set on Earth in the year 2180, decades after mechanized invaders called ARC descended from space and drove humanity underground. Players control a "Raider" living in Speranza, an underground settlement loosely built around the real-world geography of Tenerife, who ventures "Topside" into the ruined surface world to scavenge parts, weapons and crafting materials, according to Embark's official game site.

Unlike a traditional shooter campaign, there is no single-player story mode to speak of. Instead, the entire game is structured around repeated raids: short, high-stakes expeditions into procedurally varied, persistent maps where the real threat often comes from other Raider squads as much as from the ARC machines themselves. That PvPvE (player-versus-player-versus-environment) tension, borrowed from the extraction-shooter genre popularized by games like Escape from Tarkov, is the hook that has driven Arc Raiders' popularity, and it's reflected directly in the game's Steam page description, which calls it "a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future Earth," per the official Steam store listing.

How Arc Raiders is played: the core gameplay loop

Every session of Arc Raiders follows the same basic rhythm. Players start in Speranza, the underground hub, where they manage inventory, craft and repair gear at workshop stations, take on quests from vendor-like characters, and choose a destination map. From there, a squad of one, two or three players drops into a raid that lasts up to roughly 30 minutes (longer on some of the larger maps), during which they loot buildings, vehicles and ARC wreckage for crafting materials, weapon parts and currency.

The danger comes from two directions at once. ARC's mechanized forces, ranging from small scouting drones up to towering "boss"-style machines, patrol the map and will aggressively hunt down any Raider who draws their attention. At the same time, rival Raider squads are doing the exact same scavenging run, which means encounters between human players are frequent, tense, and usually fatal for the loser. If a Raider is killed, they lose everything they were carrying except whatever they stashed in a protected "safe pocket" before the raid, or managed to secure during it. The only way to actually keep anything found during a run is to extract successfully, using elevators, metro stations, air shafts, or keyed raider hatches scattered around the map, as described in the game's Wikipedia entry.

Back in Speranza, everything collected feeds into a long-term progression loop: crafting better weapons and gear, upgrading a home base, unlocking new skills, and working through quest lines tied to the game's various factions and vendors. It's a loop that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has played Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown, but Arc Raiders leans harder into readable, arcade-adjacent gunplay and a more forgiving new-player curve than most of its genre peers, which is a big part of why it crossed over to a mainstream audience so quickly after launch.

Platforms, price, and how to play

Arc Raiders is a premium, buy-to-play title rather than free-to-play, a decision Embark made late in development after years of testing it as a free-to-play game. It's available across every major platform with full cross-play between them, so PC, PlayStation and Xbox Raiders can squad up together.

There is no Mac or Linux support at this time, according to its Steam system requirements page. Pricing has fluctuated around seasonal sales and free-play weekends tied to major updates; at the time of writing, Embark is running a storewide discount and a limited free-to-play weekend alongside the Frozen Trail launch, but the standard price for the base game is $39.99, with a $59.99 Deluxe Edition that adds cosmetic bonuses and in-game currency.

How many people play Arc Raiders?

Embark hasn't published a running, real-time player counter, and Pandromeda isn't going to guess at a live concurrent-player figure that changes hour to hour. What is verifiable is that Arc Raiders' popularity has been unusually strong and sustained for a premium, non-free-to-play shooter. On launch day, the game drew roughly 250,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, among the biggest extraction-shooter debuts on record, and Embark said combined concurrency across PC, PlayStation and Xbox topped 700,000 players within the game's first two weeks, according to figures reported alongside the developer's own statements and summarized on Wikipedia.

The momentum didn't stop at launch. Nexon, Embark's publishing partner, said the game sold more than 4 million copies worldwide within two weeks, calling it the most successful launch in Nexon's history. By January 2026, Embark Executive Producer Aleksander Grøndal announced the game had surpassed 12 million players across all platforms, and Nexon's subsequent earnings disclosures put total unit sales above 16 million by mid-2026. Growth has naturally cooled from that initial surge, as it does for nearly every live-service launch, but Embark's decision this year to slow down and consolidate its content cadence into fewer, larger updates, such as Frozen Trail, points to a studio managing a large, ongoing player base rather than one scrambling to retain a shrinking one.

Is there an Arc Raiders "Season 2"? Meet Frozen Trail

A lot of players search for "Arc Raiders Season 2," but Embark doesn't actually use numbered seasons the way games like Fortnite or Call of Duty do. Instead, Arc Raiders' content calendar is built around named major updates, each centered on a new map, new ARC enemy types, and a new rewards track. Since launch, those updates have included Riven Tides in spring 2026 and, most recently, Frozen Trail, which went live on October 8, 2026, and which Embark itself describes as the game's biggest update since launch. If you're looking for the game's equivalent of a new "season," Frozen Trail is it.

Frozen Trail takes Raiders beyond the familiar Rust Belt and into Pendola Pass, a snowy mountain region reached via Ballistic Gondolas, where a downed ARC "Emperor" unit has drawn a heavier machine response. The update adds three new enemy types, according to the official Frozen Trail launch post:

• The Bully — an aggressive unit that oppresses a Raider's position with relentless attacks.
• The Skulker — a stalking enemy that ambushes from unexpected angles.
• The Hydra — a multi-target squad-killer that guards high-value Emperor and Frigate encounters.

The update also introduces two new weapons (the Bantam and the Stiletto), a slate of new traversal and utility items including a Grappling Hook and Tether Launcher, and the Outpost, a new base-building system that lets players establish and expand a persistent camp with its own Research Bench and craftable furniture, as detailed in Embark's full Frozen Trail 2.0 patch notes.

Frozen Trail's Reward Pass and other major changes

The biggest structural change in Frozen Trail isn't a map or a monster, though. It's a full overhaul of how players earn long-term rewards. Embark replaced the old "Raider Deck" system with a 60-level Reward Pass split into Free and Premium tracks, with any Raider Decks a player hadn't finished rolled into a new "Legacy Pass" so nothing already in progress is lost.

Alongside the pass relaunch, Embark also shipped a reworked skill tree, a new "Amplified Weapons" mechanic, 22 new quests, a reworked map-selection screen, and a long list of weapon and ARC-damage balance changes, plus a Collector's Set DLC bundle (adding a cosmetic outfit, a weapon stencil, and bonus Raider Tokens) that also unlocks the Premium Reward Pass track. The full breakdown of balance tweaks, bug fixes and known issues is published in Embark's patch notes linked above. To mark the update's launch, Embark also ran a free-to-play weekend from October 8 through 12, 2026, alongside a storewide 50% discount, giving newcomers a no-cost way to try the new content before committing to a purchase.

Critical reception and awards

Arc Raiders launched to strong reviews, landing in the mid-to-high 80s on Metacritic across platforms, and it went on to win Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2025 and Online Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards, per its Wikipedia page, which aggregates review scores and award wins from outlets tracked by Metacritic and OpenCritic. Not every outlet was uniformly positive — some early criticism focused on AI-generated NPC voice lines — but the overall critical and commercial reception has been among the strongest of any extraction shooter to date, helping it stand out in a genre long dominated by smaller, harder-edged titles. For comparison, readers curious how other live-service shooters are evolving their long-term content might also look at how Call of Duty has handled its own recurring content drops in our Black Ops 7 Zombies explainer, or how Fortnite keeps its seasonal crossover events fresh in our Fortnitemares 2026 coverage.

What's next, and the bottom line

Embark has said it's moving to a slower, twice-a-year cadence for major Arc Raiders content, trading frequent small drops for fewer, larger ones like Frozen Trail. That suggests the next big content milestone — whatever Embark ends up calling it, "season," expedition, or otherwise — is more likely to land in the first half of 2027 than in the next few weeks, though the studio continues to ship smaller store updates and balance patches in between. Expect continued tweaks to Frozen Trail's Pendola Pass map, its Reward Pass economy, and its new Outpost system as Embark reads player feedback from the free-play weekend and the broader launch.

The bottom line: Arc Raiders is a premium, cross-platform extraction shooter from The Finals' creators that blends high-stakes PvPvE looting with a surprisingly approachable learning curve, and it has backed that pitch up with a genuinely large, sustained player base rather than a one-week launch spike. If you've been wondering whether now is a good time to jump in, the October 2026 Frozen Trail update — with its new map, new enemies, reworked Reward Pass, and a free-to-play trial window — is as good an entry point as the game has offered since launch.

Written byJonah Reyes

Jonah Reyes leads Pandromeda's gaming coverage: console and handheld hardware, release dates, pricing changes, patch notes and the business moves behind the biggest franchises. He sources every date and price from the platform holders and publishers themselves, and says plainly when something is still only a rumour.

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