Studio Wildcard unveiled (and released!) Ark: Survival Ascended today at the Xbox Partner Preview, with a brand new trailer showing off lush lands, dangers brewing, and dinosaurs, among other creatures you’ll have a chance to potentially tame.
The game has been remade from scratch using Unreal Engine 5, and supporting cross-platform modding. It's out first on PC via Steam today before heading to Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 in November.
If you have played Ark: Survival Evolved, many of the mechanics here will look familiar, but this edition of the dinosaur survival game is intended to be fresh and offer a number of improvements to gameplay, enhanced visuals across the board, and a completely wewritten code base. Artwork was recreated to work with Unreal Engine 5 and uses some of their features like the global illumination system known as Lumen, for realistic lighting. Advanced physics upgrades introduce dynamic water, and physics that allow for foliage to move and react to characters, creatures, and projectiles. The Chaos system means more realistic movement and no more disappearing ragdolls.
Aside from the visual upgrades, which are obvious just by looking at all of the environments and all of the dinosaurs showing off in the trailer, there are a lot of practical improvements too. The modding community gets robust support that even allows for mod support for those made on PC to be usable on console. The CurseForge browser opens directly in the game and you can enjoy community created content this way. Download the Ark Devkit from the Epic Launcher and get modding. The original game had tens of thousands of mods available, so the team is hopeful that the community will come through once again.
Cross-platform multiplayer support will let you play up to 70 players on public servers and up to 8 in private sessions across console and PC. PC players on Steam will get this in December and console players will have it at launch.
We are in a new era now, with the Early Access release rolling out starting today. Head over to Ark: Survival Ascended for more.
