Studio Wildcard scraps ARK 2 and Survival Ascended bundle, new price announced

thesixthaxis.com:

Earlier this week, Studio Wildcard made a few big announcements regarding the future of the ARK franchise. The company first confirmed that ARK 2 would now be released at the end of 2024, then announced that the official servers for ARK: Survival Evolved would be turned off on August 31st, and also revealed ARK: Survival Ascended. The final game is to be a next gen version of ARK built in Unreal Engine 5.

The news was met with a lot of criticism around what would be included in ARK: Survival Ascended, with many pointing out that rebuying the game would also mean rebuying some of the DLC, and that there was no free upgrade path. Studio Wildcard had also stated that ARK: Survival Ascended would be part of an ARK Respawned bundle that would cost $49.99, and also include ARK 2. However, things have now changed.

Studio Wildcard has announced that the ARK Respawned bundle has been scrapped, and ARK: Survival Ascended will cost $59.99 with all the following content included:

With the scrapping of the bundle, it will mean that players will pay more for ARK: Survival Ascended and ARK 2. In a statement, Studio Wildcard wrote:

First things first, we are scrapping the ARK Respawned Bundle. Our intention behind this was to provide a package where you essentially got two products for the price of one. In hindsight, not the best move. Our bad; we recognize how combining ARK Survival Ascended with ARK 2 and requiring further DLC upgrades wasn’t optimal, especially since you wouldn’t be able to judge ARK 2 as no gameplay or content would be available yet.

Initially, when we had first considered doing an Unreal 5 upgrade, we planned just to port the Switch version of the game and undo the ‘graphical’ limitations required for that hardware.