ARK: Survival Ascended developer Studio Wildcard probably hoped for a better reception when the survival game stealth-launched last week. Since hitting Steam, players have complained of performance issues and more after the release, leading to Steam review bombing. Meanwhile, the developer has been deploying hotfixes to stabilize things.
Since launching on Steam last week, Ark: Survival Ascended has been plagued with performance issues. If you've played Ark for any length of time, you might remember when it first launched on early access years ago and one of the defining features was performance problems. Well, it seems Ascended is following in the footsteps of Survival Evolved here a bit.
Players have reported issues running the survival game at smooth framerates, even on powerful rigs at the lowest of settings. Other issues reported are graphical bugs, such as lighting issues or floating objects and dinos, game and server crashes (one Redditor reporting 27 crashes in one play session, another able to time out crashes to every 45 minutes on their server), connection issues and rollbacks on official servers, and much more. As a result, many players have taken to Steam to show their displeasure, with user reviews sitting at "mixed" at the time of this writing.
Our last Steam Official Network deployment for the day is now wrapping up. We predominantly addressed crashes and memory today (along with various bug fixes and some very infectious Swamp Fever ??). Full notes can be found here: https://t.co/DuNMDWDTlrG'night Survivors!
— ARK: Survival Ascended (@survivetheark) October 28, 2023
Studio Wildcard, for their part, has been working throughout the weekend, deploying hotfixes and more to the game to address these concerns. Patches that address performance, stability, and memory usage were deployed, while the company spun up more official servers in both North America and the European regions to address issues of servers being full. There are also plenty of players upset about Nitrado's exclusivity, especially considering the price of the new servers compared to the previous iteration.
Ark: Survival Ascended reimagines the original survival game, this time recreated using Unreal Engine 5. Ark: Survival Ascended brings its blend of dino taming, exploration, crafting, and more with this new version, with Studio Wildcard releasing each DLC map over time at no additional cost. Ark: Survival Ascended also uses new physics simulation, including more dynamic water and foliage simulation, to make everything more realistic as players explore the Ark.
Ark: Survival Ascended is currently in early access on PC, with a console launch to come in November.
