Embark Studios has put in a decent amount of work maintaining and developing Arc Raiders in recent months, with the company recently announcing an upcoming co-op mode slated to launch into testing on October 13 while it continues to iterate on its anti-cheat processes and detection methods. In the meantime, however, Arc Raiders Frozen Trail, referred to as the game’s “biggest update since launch,” alongside a free weekend that will run until October 12.
The combination of the new update, which introduces a slew of new content to the game and makes a host of tweaks and changes to gameplay, and the free weekend has seemingly pushed Arc Raiders to a six-month player count high on Steam. Per data from SteamDB, Arc Raiders tipped the scales at 131,388 peak concurrent players on Steam within the first 24 hours of the update and free weekend going live. Some of the major updates in Frozen Trail include a new map, new weather conditions, new enemies and weapons, a revamped skill tree, a grappling hook and other new navigation and traversal tools, and a new customizable base called The Outpost, replete with the Research Bench and hundreds of furniture designs for gamers to craft.
Not all is positive, though. Embark has removed Solo vs. Squads from the matchmaking options—a move that it explains as being motivated by a desire for “players to have a proper incentive to use all of the available matchmaking settings, which Solo vs. Squads currently lacks.” Embark says that it will be re-evaluating the game mode, so it would not be surprising to see it added to the game again at a later date after a rework. The full, lengthy update notes are available via Embark’s official blog post.