ARC Raiders' Frozen Trail Trailer Reveals Pendola Pass and Three New ARC Threats
Embark Studios' 14-minute Frozen Trail First Look trailer unveils the icy Pendola Pass map, three new ARC threats, two weapons and a grappling hook.
Embark Studios used a dedicated broadcast rather than a stray teaser to show what its extraction shooter looks like after nearly a year of live service. The Frozen Trail First Look stream went out on September 23 and doubled as a 14-minute trailer, walking through the update Embark is calling its biggest since ARC Raiders launched.
A frozen frontier beyond the Rust Belt
The video's centerpiece is Pendola Pass, a new map set in an abandoned Italian village that once served as an Exodus transport hub. Snowbound streets wind past a supermarket, a dead-quiet town square and a buried train depot, and the trailer lingers on a downed Emperor-class ARC vessel that anchors the map's biggest firefights. According to Embark, raiders who fight their way inside the wreck can walk away with rare technology not available anywhere else in the game.
Three new ARC threats, filmed mid-ambush
Frozen Trail's footage introduces three machine types built to change how fights open. Bully is a charging brute that closes distance and refuses to back off. Skulker waits at the edge of encounters and strikes when a squad is already occupied elsewhere. Hydra, the trailer's biggest reveal, is a triple-stacked turret mounted on the Frigate vessel, giving a single emplacement three independent lines of fire. The clips cut between all three, several from a first-person raider's perspective as the machines close in.
New guns and gadgets get their own segment
Two weapons get dedicated demo footage: the Stiletto, a light-ammo battle rifle pitched as an early alternative to the Renegade, and the Bantam, a snub-nosed heavy-ammo revolver built around aggressive hip-fire. Gadget footage runs longer, covering a grappling hook for scaling Pendola Pass's verticality, a Tether Launcher and Yank Grenade pair for physically restraining enemies, and a camera tool with zoom and aperture controls that doubles as an in-game selfie mode, saving shots to a player's Codex.
A Reward Pass and a base of your own
The trailer also confirms Frozen Trail's new Reward Pass, structured as a free track and a premium track rather than a battle pass locked behind a single paid tier. Embark says the free pass alone carries 200 Raider Tokens, five outfits and twenty cosmetic items, with a Legacy Pass option that preserves progress from past seasons. Alongside it, players get access to an Outpost, an extension of their Raider Den with a Research Workstation and room to decorate, plus an Amplified Weapons system that adds a fifth quality tier to fifteen existing guns.
Why Embark is calling this a reset
The scope on display lines up with what executive producer Alex Grondal has been saying about the game's post-launch pacing: that Embark needed a clearer read on what actually brings raiders back, and that the answer meant building updates with more content in them, not fewer. Frozen Trail lands after months of ARC Raiders' population drifting down from its launch peak, and Embark has been explicit that content pacing, not the core extraction loop, was the problem it needed to solve. The Steam listing for ARC Raiders already points new and returning players toward the October 8 date.
Separately from the trailer's own reveals, Embark has confirmed it will run a test window for a PvE mode from October 13 to October 20, layered on top of the Frozen Trail launch rather than delaying it. The studio has said a meaningful share of its player base already treats ARC Raiders as a cooperative game against the machines rather than a purely competitive extraction shooter, and the PvE test is being framed as a direct response to that behavior rather than a permanent mode commitment. Nothing about matchmaking, mission structure or rewards for the PvE test has been detailed yet, so those specifics stay open until Embark publishes them closer to the test's start.
What's still unconfirmed
Embark has not published patch notes, so exact numbers on the Stiletto and Bantam's damage, the Amplified Weapons tier's stat bonuses, and the full Reward Pass cosmetic list remain unannounced. The studio has scheduled a developer Q&A livestream for September 25 to take player questions directly, which is likely where some of those specifics surface before launch. Frozen Trail itself is not a rumor — Embark dated it on its own news hub — but anything not shown in the September 23 video should be treated as pending until Embark confirms it.
“That's our goal. I think we need to figure out what drives the players to come back, what they really want, and what's enough for them to come back.”Alex Grondal, Executive Producer, Embark Studios
Frozen Trail is scheduled to go live on October 8 across every platform ARC Raiders currently supports, with the September 25 Q&A serving as the last scheduled preview before launch.
The Frozen Trail Update is just around the corner. Are you ready to gear up and face whatever is waiting for us beyond the Rust Belt? Join us now on YouTube for a live premiere and take a first look at some of the upcoming content from the Frozen Trail Update, coming October 8.
— ARC Raiders (@ARCRaidersGame) on X
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Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
