Studio Wildcard, the creators of Ark: Survival Evolved, are about to pull one of the biggest scumbag moves in gaming history. Ark 2 has been delayed until next year, so in order to generate some much-needed profit, the company is releasing a new version of Ark made in UE5, called Ark: Survival Ascended. When it launches in August, the official Ark servers are shutting down for good. If you want to continue playing Ark online without paying for your own server, you’ll need to buy the Ark: Survival Ascended for $60. The news has been received as a giant middle finger to the community that is already well aware of Studio Wildcard’s history of dubious decision making. It’s a terrible move that deserves all the criticism it’s getting, but if you're an Ark fan, you’re probably not the least bit surprised.
Studio Wildcard has never had any regard for its reputationꦜ, or the opinions of its fans. As popular as Ark is, it’s an unforgivably broken game that has been monetized out the wazoo. Many of the longstanding, widely reported issues have never been addressed, but that’s never stopped the company from finding (and quickly abandoning) new projects and new ways to make a buck.
I’m not prepared to produce an exhaustive list of Studio Wildcard’s crimes, but as a long-time player of Ark with over 600 hours in the ga🐽me, I have a lot of experience getting betrayed by this developer. One of its first transgressions was Scorched Earth, a paid expansion pack that launched while Ark was st🐟ill in early access and desperately in need of major bug fixes. Studio Wildcard has always had a mind for new content: new maps and dinosaurs to bring renewed interest to the game, new DLC packs to generate revenue, but Ark has always been, and continues to be, an unstable mess.
Studio Wildcard likes to spin up a lot of projects and unceremoniously abandon them. One of the first was Ark: The Survival of the Fittest, a battle royale spin-off that lasted less than a year. Developed seemingly restarted in December, and it will be included as part of the Survival Ascended - though if you think it’s going to have long term support, you haven’t been paying attention. There was Primal Survival, a total conversion mod that was revealed at E3 2016 which let you play as the dinosaurs - it never released. The Switch version of Ark was so completely broken at launch that꧋ the entire thing was scrapped and the studio behind the GTA Trilogy remasters remade it from scratch. And let’s not forget Atlas, Studio Wildcard’s pirate-themed Ark clone that’s somehow even more busted than Ark, even four years post-early access launch.
Let’s ignore the fact that Studio Wildcard is shutting down the official servers and forcing you to pre-order Ark 2 to continue playing Ark. Let&r🦋squo;s forget that, until recently, the company was indicating the remaster would be free. Let’s not worry that Ark: Survival Evolved and all of its DLC, which will be pretty much useless outside of single player come August, is still for sale on Steam. Ignoring all that, this remaster is still going to be a disaster. Studio Wildcard is going to sell players the game they already bought, and if history is any indication, it will have even more problems than Ark has right now. Survival Ascended was originally going 🌌to be bundled with Ark 2, The Island, Survival of the Fittest, and the ‘non-canon’ maps (Ragnarok, Valguero, Crystal Isles, Lost Island, and Fjordur, presumably) while all of the DLC maps, Scorched Earth, Aberration, Extinction, and Genesis would be sold back to us over time. After all the push back, Wildcard decided to remove Ark 2 from the bundle, replace it with the DLC, and increase the price by $10. That’s what this company thinks a good compromise looks like.
If you play enough Ark, you’re bound to adꦫoꦓpt an adversarial relationship to Studio Wildcard. It’s a shame to see the company continue to earn its bad reputation.