If you’re a fan of the franchise ARK this news is likely to interest you. You’ll undoubtedly own and have invested several hours into ARK: Survival Evolved. You can now invest even more as ARK 2 has been subject of a delay. So since we’ve seen very little of this sequel, a delay should not be much of a surprise, even with release rumors last year. However, ARK is getting an upgrade. Therefore Survival Evolved is well, evolving. The upgraded version will now be called ARK: Survival Ascended.
Insider Gaming posted at the time some news about ARK: Survival Ascended. They said you can buy the ARK: Respawned Bundle if you are on Xbox Series X/S and PC. This was stated to include Survival Ascended and ARK 2. The cost of this was said to be $49.99. On PlayStation 5, you can just buy Survival Ascended for $39.99. Now we have news that the release of Survival Ascended has increased to $59.99 and doesn’t include Ark 2. All this after fans were not happy that Survival Evolved would be shut down forcing them to move to this remake. Not only that they had to rebuy the game and commit to buying a game they may not have even wanted. Even more so as we’ve seen no gameplay of the sequel
ARK: Survival Ascended The Story Now
So we have a statement from Studio Wildcard published on Steam. This is what they stated
First things first, we are scrapping the ARK Respawned Bundle. Our intention behind this was to provide a package where you essentially got two products for the price of one. In hindsight, not the best move. Our bad; we recognize how combining ARK Survival Ascended with ARK 2 and requiring further DLC upgrades wasn’t optimal, especially since you wouldn’t be able to judge ARK 2 as no gameplay or content would be available yet.
So now it’s a standalone release as we know. What content will we get? Well, they confirmed this as well. All of this is built in so it won’t be available separately.
- The Island (Released at Launch)
- Survival of the Fittest: The Island & Scorched Earth map variants (Released at Launch)
- Scorched Earth (Released at Launch)
- Aberration (Released by Q4 2023)
- Extinction (Released by Q1 2024)
- Genesis Part 1 (Released by Q1 2024)
- Genesis Part 2 (Released by Q2 2024)
- All the community-created maps are also to be released over time in 2024 (Fjordur, Ragnarok, The Center, Lost Island, Valguero, Crystal Isles)
So we will see a good deal of content. It is great for those relatively new but frustrating for those who invested heavily in the game.
What Changes In The Remaster
From looking at the information available, the remake may be more of an apt description as the game is being redone in Unreal Engine 5. The community blog however does go into much more depth on several of these points. So here is a summary of the changes
- Unreal Engine 5 Overhaul with Nanite, Lumen, and RTXDI
- Dynamic Water & Interactive Foliage
- Unreal Engine 5 performance gains
- Cross-platform Multiplayer/modding / anti-cheat
- Survival of the fittest
- Upgraded art assets
- Newly-designed holiday events
- New content, quality of life improvements, balancing, and gameplay changes
