Studio Wildcard, the developer behind ARK: Survival Ascended, has temporarily disabled PC players from participating in PvP crossplay due to widespread outcry from the community over cheating PC players.
ARK: Survival Ascended, the Unreal Engine 5 remake of the incredibly successful survival game ARK: Survival Evolved, released on PC and Xbox on November 21, but just over a week later the game’s crossplay PvP is an unplayable mess due to the rampant usage of cheats such as speed and wallhacks by PC players, at least on the small percentage of servers that were affected by the hackers.
Studio Wildcard responded to the community backlash by issuing a statement outlining its decision to temporarily disable Windows 10 PC players from joining crossplay PvP servers. The studio says its working with Microsoft and its anti-cheat vendor BattleEye to prepare a solution for the rampant cheating. The statement assured players that the issue should be resolved and PC players should be able to resume joining crossplay PvP servers early next week.
— ARK: Survival Ascended (@survivetheark) November 29, 2023
This latest issue has put a bit of a dampener on news of the game’s successful PC launch, which netted Snail, inc., owners of developer Studio Wildcard, over 600K in sales on Steam in just two weeks. Unfortunately, the cheating wasn’t the beginning of the bad news to follow, as players quickly began running into performance issues, something the original game, ARK: Survival Evolved, struggled with as well.
[Editor's Note: A correction has been made to clarify that only the Windows 10 PC version had cross play disabled while Studio Wildcard works with Battle Eye and Microsoft to rectify the issue. The previous version of this story stated that it was the PC platform as a whole. - Joseph Bradford]