ARC Raiders Just Got Its Biggest Update Yet, and It's Free to Try This Weekend

Embark Studios' extraction shooter ARC Raiders was one of the biggest launches of late 2025, pulling in something like half a million concurrent players on Steam in its first few weeks. Since then the numbers have come down a lot, the way most live multiplayer games do once the launch rush fades. This week the studio pushed back with Frozen Trail, its biggest content drop yet, and threw the whole game open for free for a few days so anyone curious could go see what changed.

What Frozen Trail actually adds

The update landed on October 8 and centers on a brand new map: a snowbound mountain settlement with abandoned villages, factories, and an observatory, which Embark describes as the largest map the game has had so far. It's built with multiple layers, including sections that drop underground, so there's more verticality to the usual loop of scavenging, fighting, and trying to make it out alive.

Frozen Trail also brings new ARC enemies, the game's name for the mechanized threat overrunning this future Earth. Embark says the new ones range from minor nuisances up to one described as "an enormous machine" built to stop players in their tracks, which lines up with what a lot of the community has been asking for. The home base menu, The Den, also grows with new Outposts in Speranze, giving players more room to customize loadouts and dig into new parts of the world between raids.

Free to play through the weekend

• Free period runs October 8 through October 12 on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox
• Full access included, Frozen Trail and all, no purchase needed
• Squads can bring in a friend who hasn't unlocked the new area, as long as one player in the group already has

It's a pretty direct way for Embark to pull lapsed players back in rather than just discounting the box price.

Where it stands on Steam right now

ARC Raiders still holds a Very Positive rating overall, sitting around 82 percent positive across roughly 199,000 Steam reviews, which is solid for a shooter well past its launch window. The full game runs $39.99 once the free period ends, and concurrent players on Steam have climbed back up noticeably with the update and the promotion after a long, steady slide from launch-week highs.

ARC Raiders is for anyone who bounced off extraction shooters before, players who tried it at launch and drifted away, or just curious people who want to see what all the noise was about last year, especially now that trying it costs nothing for a few more days.