[UPDATED – Official Reply] ARK Community Is Livid After Broken Promise of Free UE5 Remaster for Existing Users

[UPDATE] 

Studio Wildcard replied to our request to comment with the following statement, attributed to Executive Producer Jat K:

We have been really excited to deliver an incredible ARK UE5 experience. Admittedly back in January we got ahead of ourselves at that time, as the scope of the project increased, we hadn't yet realized the full time, development resources, & costs needed to produce a complete next-generation remaster.

[ORIGINAL STORY]

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:

• Dynamic Water
• Interactive Foliage
• UE5 tweaks like instanced rendering, threaded server networking, and native physics engine
• Enhanced art assets
• Cross-platform multiplayer, modding (powered by Overwolf), and anti-cheat
• New third-person camera view
• Updated minimap
• Directional sprint and walk
• Ping system
• Queue system
• New buildings and quality of life improvements
• Survival of the Fittest integrated as a supported game mode with various improvements, such as matchmaking as well as creature and character customization

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.

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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 (@jeremystieglitz) January 23, 2023

Needless to say, the announcement made last Friday didn't mention that at all. Users were instead presented with the prospect of buying a new game outright, as ARK: Survival Ascended will be priced at $39.99 on PlayStation 5 and $49.99 on PC and Xbox Series S|X, though the higher price of the latter option does include the upcoming sequel (both the full game and exclusive access to the pre-release beta) as part of the ARK Respawned bundle.

Just a quick trip to the game's subreddit and other dedicated fansites and channels will give you an idea of the outrage running through the community. While gamers may sometimes tend to exaggerate, it's hard to fault them in this particular case.

We've reached out to Studio Wildcard for a comment and will update this story if and when we hear back.

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