Arc Raiders skill trees are getting a major rework, Embark says

Embark is moving toward one of Arc Raiders’ biggest system-level changes yet, with design director Virgil Watkins saying the game’s skill tree is due for “pretty significant changes” after launch. Watkins said some skills are now “underserving their purpose,” a blunt sign that player behavior has exposed parts of the progression web that are not pulling their weight.

That matters because the skill tree in Arc Raiders is not just a perk menu. It sits beside augments, weapons, gadgets, and grenades as one of the main ways players define a build, and in a game that mixes PvE and PvP, every node carries more weight than it would in a purely co-op shooter. If one branch gives a clear edge in PvP, the system stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like a tax on anyone who picked the wrong path. If every branch is too even, the tree risks becoming decoration instead of progression. Watkins’ comments point to Embark trying to fix that tension at the structure level, not just sanding down a few outlier skills.

For players, the biggest takeaway is that the builds being invested in now may not be the final shape of Arc Raiders’ long-term progression. The game launched on October 30, 2025 across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Steam, the Epic Games Store, and NVIDIA GeForce Now, and Embark’s roadmap already promised continuous refinements, including bug fixes, balance tweaks, quality-of-life updates, maps, events, quests, and new ARC machines. The official site is still showing fresh April 2026 patch notes, which underlines that this is not a game freezing into a finished state, but one still being actively tuned.

The timing also suggests Embark is not waiting for a distant expansion cycle to act. The next Expedition is scheduled for April 28, 2026, and any skill-tree overhaul would land inside an already busy live-service cadence rather than as a one-off reset. That is the useful read for active players: Embark is not just adding content on top of Arc Raiders, it is still willing to revisit the systems that decide how long a build stays viable and how much freedom a player really has when choosing one.