ARK Community Is Livid After Broken Promises of UE5 Remaster Being Free for Existing Users
Last Friday, Studio Wildcard dropped a few big announcements on the future of the ARK game franchise. Firstly, it delayed the sequel to late 2024, stating that it still needed to get to grips with the Unreal Engine 5 technology.
On the other hand, the developers announced they would do so by remastering their megahit ARK: Survival Evolved into ARK: Survival Ascended to take advantage of the Unreal Engine 5's Lumen and Nanite features, as well as NVIDIA's RTX Direct Illumination and a plethora of improvements, including:
That would look pretty good on paper as a series of across-the-board improvements to both visuals and gameplay, except there's a couple of pretty big catches that the ARK community is far from okay with.
Studio Wildcard said that the official ARK: Survival Evolved servers would be going offline with the release of Survival Ascended (currently planned for late August) for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. While it'll be possible to use the final data from the official servers on unofficial servers, a portion of the community undoubtedly enjoyed the simplicity of just logging into an official server and will miss that opportunity.
Secondly, and most aggravatingly, most ARK fans feel cheated since Studio Wildcard co-founder, co-creative director, lead designer and programmer Jeremy Stieglitz had promised in late January that the upcoming UE5 remaster would be free for existing users.
To clarify: the UE5 tease a couple weeks back is referring to in-the-works complete free upgrade/remaster of ARK Survival Evolved in UnrealEngine5. Not a cinematic. We havent officially announced the ARK UE5 upgrade yet 'cause there's other major things we wanna show then as well https://t.co/heP331SfS9
— Jeremy Stieglitz
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