ARK: Survival Ascended Debuts in Steam's Early Access; Console Versions Delayed to November
ARK: Survival Ascended has finally arrived on Steam. Unfortunately, on consoles the developers are still struggling with some issues. For now, PS5 and XSX/S owners have to settle for new gameplay footage from the Xbox Partner Preview show.
UPDATE #2: The first reviews are appearing on Steam - only 44% of them are positive (out of more than 300 issued at this point). Players complain mainly about optimization, which seems to be non-existent. The situation was summed up best by one of the Steaming users: "Big shock, unoptimized garbage."
UPDATE: After minor perturbations ARK: Survival Ascended has debuted on Steam's early access. You can purchase the remaster on the UE5 engine 10% off to celebrate the debut. It is not being given away for free to owners of the original, whose official servers were shut down on September 30. Despite this, the game has already been acquired by considerable crowds - at the moment more than 20 thousand people are playing.
Unfortunately, on consoles the problems with multiplayer seem to be more serious - as a result, devs at Wildcard were forced to postpone the debut on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S to November.. For obvious reasons, only then will cross-play between all platforms become available.
Xbox Partner Preview show brought a lot of materials from studios working with Microsoft. Among them was the first gameplay trailer for ARK: Survival Ascended, refreshed version of the well-known survival game with prehistoric fauna. You can watch the footage below.
ARK remaster on Unreal Engine 5 stirred up a lot of controversy, mainly due to the price and the shutdown of the servers of the original - Survival Evolved. Instead, gamers were hoping for the debut of the sequel, announced many years ago, which is still delayed and turns out to be a completely different game from its predecessor (the developers announce it as... a soulslike game). You can learn more about it from our previous news.
Survival Ascended is supposed to be, so to speak, a training for Wildcard in the use of the new engine (and, at the same time, an opportunity to clean up the code). Not surprisingly, the material is largely focused on the presentation of the new look of the prehistoric world of ARK.
ARK: Survival Ascended is set to debut "soon." The game was supposed to hit the market by the end of October, but there has been a delay, and the developers still have not announced a new release date.
