Ark: Survival Ascended lead designer Jeremy Stieglitz admits 'the servers are ass, they run like ass, and their stability is ass'
Ark: Survival Ascended, the Unreal Engine 5 remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved, had a heck of a launch in early October. With 600,000 copies sold after only two weeks, it looked like it'd quickly march right up the list of the most played games on Steam, where the original dino survival game perched for so many years.
Not quite. Ascended is currently averaging about 50,000 concurrent players and sits at around number 20 on the Steam charts, which is impressive—but player satisfaction is a different story. Ark is currently sporting the dreaded «Mixed» reviews label on Steam, and only about 60% of its more than 35,000 reviews are positive.
While complaints in those reviews run the gamut of crashes, bugs, poor optimization and low fps (which sounds a lot like Ark's original early access launch back in 2014) a lot of reviews mention servers as its biggest issue.
«Official servers still crash and roll back every 15 minutes,» reads one Steam review. «Official servers also still stutter and lag like i'm stuck in 2015.»
«Constant crashes with the added penalty of having to spam connect on servers for 20-30 minutes before getting let in,» reads another. «Of the 2 hours I've played, at least 1 full hour was spent trying to connect to ANY server.»
«Fix your dumb servers,» another review bluntly demands. «It is like Atlas 2 but with more bugs and less fun.»
If it's any consolation, the co-creator of Ark: Survival Ascended not only hears those cries from the community, but agrees with the general sentiment.
«Firstly, I wanna say the servers are ass, they run like ass, and their stability is ass,» Studio Wildcard co-founder and Ark co-creator Jeremy Stieglitz said on a recent Extra Life charity Twitch livestream. (The full stream is
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