ARK: Survival Ascended is Live on Steam!!

Respawn into a new dinosaur survival experience beyond your wildest dreams… as ARK is reimagined from the ground-up into the next-generation of videogame technology with Unreal Engine 5! You awake on a mysterious island, your senses overwhelmed by the blinding sunlight and brilliant colors bouncing off every surface around you, the azure waters of a verdant Island lapping at your bare feet. A deep roar echoes from the misty jungle, jolting you into action, and you stand up – not afraid, but intrigued. Are you ready to form a tribe, tame and breed hundreds of species of dinosaurs and other primeval creatures, explore, craft, build, and fight your way to the top of the food-chain? Your new world awaits… step through the looking-glass and join it!

• ARK: Survival Ascended has completely recreated and redesigned the artwork and worlds of ARK to take advantage of the latest in videogame technology, Unreal Engine 5, using high-end graphics features such as fully dynamic Global Illumination (“Lumen”), so that light bounces realistically of off surfaces and provides realistic reflections, and advanced mesh streaming (“Nanite”) of hundreds of millions of triangles for extreme detail.
   
• Advanced new physics systems such as dynamic water so that every creature creates waves, ripples, splashes, and bubbles as they move through fluids, and fully interactive physical foliage where every blade of grass, bush, and tree reacts to characters, explosions, projectiles, and physics objects. Knock down a tree, and see it crash into other trees and disturb all the foliage on its way down to smacking into the grass below! Detect an enemy moving sneakily through the grass as it shifts and sways in response to their presence. Demolish a building and watch the pieces break apart realistically, interacting with the grass and water as they fall.

• ARK: Survival Ascended includes access to all of ARK’s worlds, including Scorched Earth, Aberration, Extinction, ARK Genesis Part 1, ARK Genesis Part 2, and more. The Island is released now, with the subsequent expansion worlds to be added at no additional cost on a regular basis.
   
• The definitive survival experience returns better than ever: design your Survivor, form a tribe, and tame, train, breed & ride dinosaurs within a living ecosystem. Watch your food, water, temperature, and weather patterns. Slowly expand outwards as you harvest, build structures, farm crops, customize your visual designs, and proceed to explore to uncover the true nature of The Island and the worlds beyond. 
   
• Thorough Quality of Life revamps in every area: redesigned User Interfaces, dynamic navigation for intelligent creature pathfinding, Wild Babies, Photo Mode, new Camera systems, new Map system, Tracking System, new Structures and Items, new Creatures, and much more.

• Cross-Platform Modding: Download & play new custom content created by players, including new maps, creatures, items, and game modes, through a dedicated new Mod-bowser directly within the game! Enjoy an endless stream of new ARK content as the creativity and talent of the community is fully unleashed for the first time ever across gaming platforms!
   
• Cross-Platform Multiplayer: form your online tribe across different gaming platforms as you work together to survive and thrive on the ARK!
   
• Supports public online multiplayer for up to 70 players, private-session multiplayer for up to 8 players, and local split-screen for 4 players (Steam PC) and 2 players (PS5, XBOX and Windows Store).

Available on PC now!

Console Survivors,

Last night, while continuing our internal quality assurance process for ASA, our team identified some critical issues in the multiplayer version of the game that would have had major implications for the console versions of the game. Unfortunately, due to these issues, we’ve decided to delay the launch of the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game until November. 

We understand that this news is disappointing, and trust us, we’re disappointed too. The team really did aim to get everything out for all platforms in October, but we fell short just at the finish line. We’re sorry about that, as we know a lot of you have been very excited about this launch and made plans around it.

Next steps?

As of now, we’re working on two tracks. One track is managing the launch of PC, and the other track is preparing a patch for the game's console version with the latest content/gameplay updates and fixes.

The additional time lets us resolve those specific multiplayer issues and bring the game up to the PC specification, which received a number of critical improvements as the console versions were going through certification. 

We’re still planning to keep crossplay between Steam and Consoles disabled until we’ve entered the quicker certification process, but that decision could change based on how things are looking with PC at the time.

The added benefit of this change is that it also enables us to ensure a smoother console launch as we’ll have fought many of the initial fires with PC and have a more content-rich and stable modding experience that has been battle-tested when the game becomes available on consoles. 

Finally, when the console is ready to be released, a fresh set of Official Servers will go online with bonus rates (for a period of time) to allow you to catch yourself up in preparation for Crossark.

We know that this news is far from ideal, however we’ll be doing our best to make the game as good as it can be when it launches in November. We are really grateful for the support and cannot wait to get ASA with cross-platform mods into your hands!

Studio Wildcard