Studio Wildcard announced what may be their biggest project yet for ARK: Survival Ascended. It's going to be an engine upgrade for the game to Unreal 5.5. The target launch is planned to be sometime between April 15 to May 15.
In a statement, the studio revealed that this rather massive undertaking is taking longer than anticipated. For now, the work is focused on eliminating the bugs which occurred as a result of the upgrade to the already existing content. Still, the studio anticipates that once the upgrade goes live, players should immediately notice the benefits. These include the likes of rendering and load times, to name a few. There's also going to be changes that should significantly lower the size of the base game installation.
Concern on Modders
The studio admitted that there are concerns particularly about modders and what's going to happen to the mods. The development team shared that they're doing what they can to ensure that there won't be that many crashes to the game.
The plan is to make sure that each Premium Mod is functioning for release as well as the sampling of the most popular Free Mods. The studio revealed that partners at Overwolf are recooking all the ASA mods automatically for UE 5.5. It goes without saying that once the upgrade happens, there may be functional issues happening on most of the mods. However, when that happens they'll be doing their best to fix them.
For future upgrades, the studio is looking into what they can do without recooking mods. They also said that they won't be doing full Engine upgrades more than once per year.
Ragnarok DLC
The upcoming Ragnarok DLC is originally planned to be released sometime in April. Since the map is being developed for the 5.5 version of the engine, the studio said it means the upgrade has to be released first before the map is launched. It also means that the progress of Ragnarok is dependent on the upgrade. As a result, the DLC is now coming out on June 2.
ARK: Survival Ascended offers the ultimate survival experience as it invites players to design their own Survivor, tame dinosaurs, and unravel the true nature of The Island and worlds beyond. There are also quality of life enhancements that include a refreshed user interface, intelligent creature pathfinding, wild babies, new map system, updated tracking system, new structures, creatures, and much more. Get ARK: Survival Ascended on Steam now.
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