If you’ve been playing Arc Raiders since launch and quietly thinking the skill tree feels a bit… off — turns out the devs agree with you. Embark Studios design director Virgil Watkins sat down with host Adam Orth on the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast and was pretty refreshingly honest about where things stand with Arc Raiders’ skill system. Short version: significant changes are on the way, and the studio knows the current setup isn’t doing everything it should.
“It was a tough problem space for us and I don’t think by any means we nailed it,” Watkins said during the conversation. “There are definitely skills in there that are under-serving their purpose.” That’s the kind of self-awareness you don’t always hear from developers, especially on a live service game that’s still pulling over 95,000 concurrent players on Steam daily — even after dropping from its all-time launch peak of nearly 482,000 in November 2025.
What’s Actually Wrong With the Skill Tree Right Now
The honest answer is: it’s a mixed bag. On one hand, parts of the system work exactly as you’d want — skills that genuinely unlock new things you couldn’t do before, like cracking breach lockers through the survival tree for better loot. Those feel meaningful. You unlock something, you feel it, you understand why you made that choice.
But then there are chunks of the tree that just… don’t feel like much. Passive percentage bumps, small statistical tweaks that technically exist but don’t change how you actually play. Watkins didn’t pretend otherwise — he straight up said he personally doesn’t love that kind of design, even if he acknowledged those stat-based skills do serve some purpose in how the broader system hangs together.
The deeper problem, though, is that as Arc Raiders itself has evolved since launch — the game loops have shifted, content has been added, systems have changed — the skill tree has kind of been left behind. It was built for an earlier version of the game, and now it doesn’t quite match what Arc Raiders actually is in 2026. That mismatch is part of what’s driving the rework conversation internally.
The PvP vs. PvE Balancing Act
This is where it gets genuinely tricky, and Watkins was upfront about it. Designing skills for an extraction shooter that has both a very active PvP crowd and a dedicated PvE community is not a simple problem to solve.
His point was direct: “Do we really want someone who invests in this wing of the skill tree to be obviously more capable in PvP? Because they chose those skills, they’re going to win over someone who invested in the red tree instead?” There’s no clean answer there. Make skills too impactful and you’re essentially punishing players who built their trees without PvP in mind. Make them too subtle and you’re back to the “why does this even matter” problem that already exists.
It’s the same headache that shows up in basically every online game with layered RPG progression. You can look at how God of War handled its build depth, or the way Assassin’s Creed games have tried to stack skill trees onto their action gameplay — sometimes it works brilliantly, sometimes it feels like padding, and often it’s somewhere in between. Arc Raiders is currently sitting in that uncomfortable middle ground, and the player base has noticed.
What’s Changing Right Now vs. What’s Still Coming
Before we get to the future, it’s worth catching up on what’s already moving. The next Arc Raiders Expedition kicks off on April 28 with the Riven Tides update, and Embark has already overhauled how the progression reset works this time around. Instead of the old system where your skill points from an Expedition were tied to how much stash value you had accumulated — which basically just rewarded hoarding — the new Expedition runs over five days and rewards you for dealing damage. The idea is to actually get people using their loot, pushing into firefights, living in the game rather than sitting on a pile of Caps waiting for the clock to run out.
That change hasn’t landed without controversy. A chunk of the community had been grinding stash value specifically for the old Expedition system, so flipping the script right before it goes live stung for some people. There’s also frustration around the five-day window being restrictive for players who can’t commit to specific play days. That’s a fair criticism. When you’re asking people to reset their progress, the hoops they jump through need to feel worth it.
But the skill tree rework Watkins is teasing goes beyond all of that. He was careful not to drop specifics, but “significant changes” were his words — and given how openly he criticized the current state of the system, it sounds like this isn’t just going to be some number adjustments buried in a patch note. The goal, based on everything he said, seems to be closing the gap between “skills that technically exist” and “skills that actually make you feel different for choosing them.”
Where Arc Raiders Stands Heading Into Riven Tides
Arc Raiders has had an interesting first several months. It peaked massively, held remarkably well by live service standards — retaining 91% of its player base through December 2025 while competitors struggled — and has since settled into a more natural daily rhythm. That’s not a crisis, but the content appetite from the dedicated player base is real, and Embark has been public about knowing they need to keep feeding it.
On top of the skill tree work, the studio has dropped hints about player trading coming at some point, and there are apparently plans for a full 3D player hub that would let you properly explore the Speranza space station beyond the current setup. Whether any of that arrives soon or is still deep in development is unclear, but it signals that Embark isn’t just maintaining the game — they’re still figuring out what it can become.
The skill tree situation is honestly the most interesting thread to pull on right now, because it touches everything. How you build your character shapes how you approach raids, how confident you feel going into PvP encounters, and whether the Expedition reset actually feels worth doing. If Embark can land a skill system that gives players meaningful choices without wrecking the PvE/PvP balance, that would go a long way toward making Arc Raiders feel more complete.
For now, Riven Tides drops April 28. Let’s see what it brings — and wait to hear more about whatever Watkins is clearly sitting on regarding the skill rework.
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