Open-world survival RPG Ark: Survival Ascended surprise launches on PC, also there's finally a gameplay trailer
After a controversial reveal, months of silence, and an abrupt tease featuring one whole screenshot, open-world survival RPG remake Ark: Survival Ascended has finally released a proper gameplay trailer just in time for a surprise launch on PC.
Surprise! Ark: Survival Ascended is available on PC today (though Steam still shows "coming soon" at the time of writing), just barely making its previously announced October release date. Fans had begun to worry that the project had been internally delayed, but now they can see it for themselves – on PC anyway. As the aptly named Studio Wildcard revealed during today's Xbox Partner showcase, Ascended won't come to PS5 and Xbox Series X until November.
So yes, the launch trailer for Ascended is also its first-ever gameplay trailer, showing off its fully Unreal Engine 5-remastered forests and dinosaurs. Wildcard promises a game "that harnesses the cutting-edge power of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) for huge improvements and enhancements to the visuals and gameplay. ARK's codebase has been fully rewritten, and its artwork recreated by hand to take full advantage of UE5, using high-end graphics features such as fully dynamic Global Illumination ('Lumen'), so that light bounces realistically off off hundreds of millions of triangles for extreme detail."
Yep, mhmm, yeah. I've been playing and writing about games long enough to confidentaly say: them's some graphics right there, folks. It's safe to say Ark has never looked better, with the possible exception of mods. Which is nice and all, but I'd imagine many players are equally or more interested in the gameplay-facing stuff in the upgrade, which includes:
On the content side, Ascended has launched with the original game's biggest updates:
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