I don’t usually boast about it, mostly because it makes you reflect a little when you realize you once spent over 2,000 hours on a single game, but Ark: Survival Evolved is without a doubt the most played title in my Steam collection. I ultimately dragged myself away soon after its 1.0 release in 2017, but I still feel a combination of nostalgia and hazy PTSD when I think back on its early access years.
Ark is a wildly immersive survival adventure that has a premise that would have made a child-me dizzy with excitement—live alongside the dinosaurs!—and a ton of exciting ways to transform its bizarre little home into a vicious corner of unreality. However, I also recall the game as being very contemptuous of the players’ time, always teetering on the verge of malfunction, and requiring a great deal of maintenance and devotion to protect hours and hours of work from disappearing in the blink of an eye.
I eventually stopped playing Ark because of broken promises and a lack of community involvement, so it wasn’t shocking to see another controversy arise when developer Studio Wildcard abruptly revealed earlier this year that Ark: Survival Ascended would be an Unreal Engine 5 “next-generation remake” of the original game.
While Ascended is nominally an optional upgrade, it would be required for users to continue utilizing Wildcard’s official servers. As if that weren’t awful enough, getting Ascended would require paying full price for the much-delayed and still unclear Ark 2. Following a reasonable outcry, Wildcard gave in and decided to separate Ascended and Ark 2, but this was hardly a major win for the players; Ascended would now cost more than the original bundle, even with some DLC included, and official servers for the original Ark were still closing. This meant that long-term players, especially those on PvE servers, might lose years’ worth of progress come wipe day.
It’s not the kind of start that gives you hope for a project, especially when it’s followed by a series of setbacks, including a postponed release date, a postponement of the console versions until the last minute, and a delay of the Xbox version with no sign of a PlayStation version until 2024. To be honest, however, I was interested. During my two years of playing the first game, I had a lot of fun and made a lot of memories, including building a fabulously opulent farmhouse in a peaceful PvE nook. The bewildering array of additions and improvements that accompanied Ark: Survival Ascended’s unexpected PC launch last month also gave me cause for cautious optimism, as it may be the much-needed fresh start for Ark. Given its sleek, narrative-heavy, Vin Diesel-starring trailer for Ark 2, it seems likely that Ark will finally be able to take the rickety original into the kind of uber-polished AAA territory Wildcard clearly aspires to. With some hesitation, I must confess, I made the decision to return for the first time in over six years.
I decided to take it slow in this first experiment, setting up a private game to get acquainted with Ark’s mechanical quirks. This was primarily because I wasn’t prepared for the intense level of – how shall I put it diplomatically – dedication that I had remembered being typical of other players on official servers when I first started playing the game. And first reactions were a nice surprise, if not too good. The opening sequence was far more polished than the Ark I was familiar with from six years ago, right down to the character creation and title screen.
The most obvious example of this is the character generator in Ascended, which has undergone an incredibly ridiculous makeover. Now, Ascended’s selections are almost overwhelming compared to the decidedly poor offering available in the first game, which produced a million memes of perplexingly malformed player characters (and never changed, despite many promises). It seems like you can adjust every muscle on your avatar in a million different ways, which makes it even more absurd when Wildcard insists that every player has the exact same face, pulling this bewildering new level of customization option right out of its grasp. As things turned out, this is only the beginning of the new game’s mysterious moments of self-destruction.
Now that the character creation is complete, we can enter the game proper. However, the only face that is accessible to me makes me appear like someone put Quentin Tarantino’s head on Stretch Armstrong. For the sake of nostalgia, I went back to my old hangout on the southeast coast of The Island map. And my god, the recreation of Wildcard is gorgeous. A little over the top, maybe, but everything has been meticulously redesigned, from the lavishly detailed flora to the elaborately sculpted boulders. The water, which folds and cascades as you splash about, is especially striking. The issue is, of course, that the moment you attempt to move in any direction, the whole illusion collapses; performance, as you have already heard, varies greatly from outrageously inconsistent to utterly awful despite many updates – not convincing proof that this remake is a good improvement.
Of course, Wildcard has promised performance enhancements, but significant improvements to its similarly erratic predecessor required years of post-launch assistance from the studio. This brings me to my immediate concern: even in Ascended, which is being billed as a “ground-up” remake, there are far too many instances of old problems resurfacing. I remember being so overcome with nostalgia when I shut down the game and my screen exploded with error messages I hadn’t seen since 2017, and there are still a ton of reports online of dinosaurs and players ambling through the floor. It’s not quite clear from Wildcard if any of this will be fixed quickly enough or to anyone’s satisfaction.
To Ascended’s credit, it has a lot of quality of life enhancements that really make for a more enjoyable experience in addition to the cosmetic makeover. It’s largely in the little things, like the much enhanced construction tools or the fact that servers are no longer forced to use a gamma console trick to see where they’re going at night. However, for every notable advancement in Ascended, there’s an obvious issue from the original that is still there, such as the very uneven user interface (UI) or the strangely weightless player motions, and it becomes evident how haphazardly the whole project is approached.
As harsh as it may be to say, Ark has always seemed more like a game that happened by accident than a product of significant creative skill on the side of Wildcard, and this impression is only made worse by Ascended. I’m still laboriously fiddling with an awkward, unintuitive inventory system; balance is all over the place; new dinosaurs and building pieces, a photo mode, cross-platform support, and so on. There just doesn’t seem to be any consistency of vision here. Ark: Survival Ascended is simply a very strange beast; it’s a remake that pays little attention to the basic bugs that have long dogged the game and is entirely focused on the fancy things.
After six years, it doesn’t seem like Wildcard’s perspective has changed much. Given that the developer’s constant inability to meet its own public deadlines has long been a source of amusement among players, it was both hilarious and all too predictable when Ascended’s surprise launch was abruptly postponed by nearly a full day. That’s what worries me. Given the studio’s past performance, why should anybody think that things would be different this time around and accept its assurances that significant advancements are unquestionably in the works?
It’s true that I’m being quite skeptical, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t good to be back in Ark for the first time in a long time. Despite its peculiar and unreliable mechanics and haphazardly executed concepts, the game is nonetheless very adept at producing exhilarating spontaneous experiences. Even small moments like silently stumbling on a handsome vista in the last light of the day after hours spent exploring tangles of mountaintop terrain remain in my memory—dangerous rescues in the frozen north back in the day, nights spent splitting duties with my tribe to tame some of Ark’s most ferocious beasts. And when I returned via Ascended, I had the same old joy: escaping raptors, making a makeshift home for myself on a sunny beach, and readjusting to Ark’s strong survival core.
However, one concern persisted: is Ascended worth uprooting an entire community, cynically driving them off official servers, requiring a fresh purchase for many at a considerable cost, and then offering this technically defective, wildly inconsistent, partially realized replica in exchange? As for me, I believe I’ll need to see some real commitment from Wildcard before I’d be tempted to go back in any meaningful way. Steam figures would suggest plenty of players are eating Ascended up, and I know my Ark well enough to appreciate that most of the fun will be going on in heavily modded private servers, specifically (and tellingly) tailored to sidestep Ark’s more egregious design issues.