Studio Wildcard has announced a remaster for the first ARK game in Unreal Engine 5, called ARK: Survival Ascended. ARK: Survival Ascended will take advantage of numerous UE5 features, and will release in August 2023.
What’s really disappointing here, though, is that this remaster will not be free to all existing owners of ARK. Instead, gamers will have to purchase a special bundle for it. According to the devs, this bundle will include both ARK 2 and ARK: Survival Ascended. This bundle will be available to purchase from the end of August for up to 1 year (after which ARK: Survival Ascended and ARK 2 will be sold separately). In other words, the devs will be initially forcing you to purchase ARK 2 in order to gain access to this remaster. What the hell, right?
Needless to say that this set the game’s fanbase ablaze. And, well, we can’t really blame them. After all, Studio Wildcard’s CEO was claiming that this would have been a free upgrade. So yes, a lot of ARK players feel betrayed or cheated. And rightfully so. If you’re not going to offer something for free then you should not be advertising it like that.
To clarify: the UE5 tease a couple weeks back is referring to in-the-works complete free upgrade/remaster of ARK Survival Evolved in UnrealEngine5. Not a cinematic. We havent officially announced the ARK UE5 upgrade yet 'cause there's other major things we wanna show then as well https://t.co/heP331SfS9
— Jeremy Stieglitz (@jeremystieglitz) January 23, 2023
However, Studio Wildcard is not the only company that has done something like that. Who can forget the awful GTA Trilogy Remasters? Or the remasters for Crysis 2 and Crysis 3? Or even Alan Wake Remastered? And what do all of them have in common? Well, all of them are not offered as free upgrades to owners of the original versions.
Anyway, at launch, players will have access to The Island, Scorched Earth. Furthermore, the team will include a new revamped game mode, Survival of the Fittest. And yes, if you don’t purchase the remaster, you won’t be able to play ARK at all. Studio Wildcard will shut down the ARK servers once Survival Ascended comes out. Man, what a clusterf’k.
Lastly, Studio Wildcard has delayed ARK 2. The game will now release at the end of 2024. Studio Wildcard claimed that this delay will give it enough time to polish it. My guess is that the team will use ARK: Survival Ascended as its base for it. After all, the remaster will be using numerous UE5 features. In case you’re wondering, the remaster will be using Nanite, Lumen and RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI).
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I’m pretty sure they are shutting down the ark 1 servers as well
Yeah, that’s why the fans are mad, not because this is not free (that too).
As an Ark player I would say the fanbase is P.O.’ed because of Ark Ascended being sold (some time ago one of the devs said the UE5 version would be free), the whole game price including the DLCs reaching $90 (with Ark 2 force included for PC)
And yeah, wiping all servers where players spent hours and days building, breeding dinos and beating bosses and each other is bound to enrage everyone
I hope they shutdown every live service game. I don’t know why people won’t fuqin learn. You don’t own a damn thing these days. These are the same people on steam that will jump down your throat if you contest Denuvo or any type of DRM.
Another studio doing worse than Bethesda did with Skyrim SE on PC?
Come on guys, you had one bar… Don’t do worse than Bethesda… Was it really that hard?
WildCard is a bit… infamous because of release delays, never fixed bugs and such… ?
I played ARK so long ago that I didn’t even remember the studio’s name anymore, let alone whatever record they had for release issues and bugs.
utorrent
Wow. Let’s see how Ark 2 does then, and worst of all, i anticipate it will do fine.
I only have 30mins of gameplay on this crappy game on Steam and had to go leave a negative review for the sake of what is right in this world. Shutting down the servers for a game people payed for just to push out a paid remaster you must buy if you want to keep playing is straight up worse than scam citizen levels of theft.
Doesn’t matter what engine they use, it will still be SHlT this folks walking around as if new engine = new game with fresh coat of paint.
So game is ported once from Unreal 4.10 whatever to 4.27 on Switch and now to 5.x on everything else. Lol.
So game is ported once from Unreal 4.10 whatever to 4.27 on Switch and now to 5.x on everything else. Lol.
A very well polished turd won’t change to caviar, no, it’s still just turd.