Ark 2 Sounds Like a Very Different Game to the Original Ark: Survival Evolved

ign.com:

Ark 2 will be a third-person game with "Souls-like melee combat" and a whole AI enemy force to fight against in PvE. In other words, it sounds pretty different to the original Ark: Survival Evolved.

After the game got a new trailer at the Xbox-Bethesda summer showcase, developer Studio Wildcard sent a press release explaining a number of newly announced features, and it uncluded some surprising details. The biggest is that the game swaps the original's first-person perspective for third-person, promising, "Advanced character traversal mechanics include mantling, free-climbing, parkour, sliding, and swinging!"

Connected to that change is a promise of melee combat similar to FromSoftware's Souls games, offering "Target-lock, blocks, dodges, combos, staggers and special attacks," with a focus on player skill. Ark 2 will also include an entire opposing AI force called the Aratai, who "hunt & attack you while riding their own tamed creatures, as they seek to drive human interlopers from their world."

The original Ark was built around players crafting, scavenging, fighting and taming dinosaurs in a shared server. Ark 2 sounds like a more traditional narrative-led game in many respects – and will be set on a brand new planet, "where native flora and fauna are being overrun by invasive primeval creatures, from an extinct Earth."

It's hard to get a sense of how different Ark 2 will be from the original game given that we're still yet to see gameplay, although today's new cinematic (above) is said to be in-engine, and created using Unreal Engine 5.

Studio Wildcard promised several other features, too:

There's much we still don't know about Ark 2, but we do know one thing – it stars Vin Diesel for some reason. The actor plays the game's