Studio Wildcard has summarised that the popular Ark: Survival Evolved is getting a remaster to make up for the fact that the sequel won’t be coming to us this year.
Let’s start with Ark: Survival Ascended, which will be released at the end of August for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. This game will run on Unreal Engine 5. On PC, it will support Nvidia’s RTX Direct Illumination ray tracing technology, but other UE5 features (Lumen, Nanite) will also appear in the remaster. There will also be dynamic water, interactive vegetation, more rendering fixes, revamped art assets, cross-platform (and cross-progression, i.e.; you can pick up where you and left off on any platform) multiplayer. The studio is putting together the multiplayer with the help of Overwolf. There will also be a new third-person camera, new structures, redesigned mini-map, a new ping system, new queueing system in this version.
You’ll also find a battle royale-inspired Survival of the Fittest game mode, overseen by a dedicated team in development. The Island and non-canon DLC maps will also join the remaster. Survival Ascended is also scheduled to receive canon DLC in the year’s final quarter (October-December) and will include four new creatures. It will be available as a standalone game for $/€40 on PlayStation 5, and the Ark Respawned bundle will be available on PC and Xbox Series for $/€50. Still, it will also give us Ark II alongside the remaster, with access to an early beta of Ark II next year. This bundle will be available between August 2023 and August 2024, only for one year, after which the two games can be purchased separately.
When Ark: Survival Ascended is released, Ark: Survival Evolved’s servers will be shut down, but the game saves will be downloadable to continue playing on single-player, non-dedicated, unofficial servers. So, it won’t be what Activision Blizzard did with the first installment of Overwatch. When the second installment was released, it replaced the 2016 original, so it was canceled out of necessity.
But let’s see how Studio Wildcard explains the postponement of Ark II: “After careful consideration, we have decided to delay the sequel’s launch to the end of 2024 when it still launches exclusively on Xbox, Game Pass, and Windows distribution platforms. We’ve put much thought into delaying Ark II to improve the final product and the team’s well-being. This news will disappoint many—we feel it too—but we’re confident this difficult decision is the right one. So why the delay? We aim to make Ark II the best game and provide players with a truly exceptional and rewarding experience. The Unreal Engine 5 is incredibly new technology to us (and all developers). We aim to use this cutting-edge tech to its fullest potential while creating a game with never-before-achieved scope. As we learn more about the engine and develop the sequel, we have adapted our workflows and pipelines to accommodate this new next-generation paradigm. Because of everything that involves, we need more time for development.
We sincerely apologize for this delay and genuinely appreciate your understanding. Your support and passion are vital to us, and we will continue to work intensively to deliver the ultimate next-gen dinosaur survival experience. With that in mind, we do not plan to showcase any gameplay, screenshots, or videos of Ark II this year; however, we intend to keep you informed and engaged in the development process by regularly showcasing more Ark II assets in the months ahead, leading to our gameplay reveal next year.
Our desire to push the boundaries of what Ark II is on a next-generation platform has led us to the decision to create an intermediary Unreal Engine 5 Ark product utilizing some of the new technology we are building, allowing us to further our mastery of the new engine and ultimately battle-test some of our riskier technical advancements. We’ll understand how well the rendering and lighting techniques work on console, what performance will be like, whether we can optimize and deliver interactive water and foliage on a widescale basis, and much more. We will provide cross-platform modding, multiplayer, and a new account system, informing us about other changes we should consider for Ark II. Due to the scope of all the technical and quality-of-life changes required for such a next-gen experience, it is not feasible to make this new version of Ark backward compatible, which led us to conclude that this would need to be a separate product.
We also recognize that Ark II has some pretty significant design changes from the original game, which may not make it as appealing to everyone (looking at you, Soulslike combat, primitive-only weaponry, and strict third-person mechanics—and an overall “very serious” tone), which is why we feel it is essential to provide players with a fully next-gen version of the original experience to ensure that fans can continue to enjoy the Ark they know for years to come.”
So Ark: Survival Ascended will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox 5, and PC at the end of August, followed by Ark II on Xbox 5 and PC (and Game Pass) at the end of 2024.
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