Ark: Survival Ascended, the Unreal Engine 5 remaster of Ark: Survival Developed, had a heck of a launch in early October. With 600,000 copies offered after solely two weeks, it seemed prefer it’d shortly march proper up the record of probably the most performed video games on Steam, the place the unique dino survival sport perched for therefore a few years.
Not fairly. Ascended is at present averaging about 50,000 concurrent gamers and sits at round quantity 20 on the Steam charts, which is spectacular—however participant satisfaction is a distinct story. Ark is at present sporting the dreaded “Blended” critiques label on Steam, and solely about 60% of its greater than 35,000 critiques are optimistic.
Whereas complaints in these critiques run the gamut of crashes, bugs, poor optimization and low fps (which sounds so much like Ark’s authentic early entry launch again in 2014) plenty of critiques point out servers as its largest difficulty.
“Official servers nonetheless crash and roll again each quarter-hour,” reads one Steam evaluate. “Official servers additionally nonetheless stutter and lag like i am caught in 2015.”
“Fixed crashes with the added penalty of getting to spam join on servers for 20-Half-hour earlier than getting let in,” reads one other. “Of the two hours I’ve performed, at the very least 1 full hour was spent attempting to connect with ANY server.”
“Repair your dumb servers,” one other evaluate bluntly calls for. “It’s like Atlas 2 however with extra bugs and fewer enjoyable.”
If it is any comfort, the co-creator of Ark: Survival Ascended not solely hears these cries from the neighborhood, however agrees with the overall 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 mentioned on a latest Additional Life charity Twitch livestream. (The total stream is right here.)
“We have to enhance it,” Stieglitz added. “It is gonna be improved imminently.”
That is a reasonably refreshing assertion and never the standard boilerplate response you are likely to see from sport studios. Alternatively, server issues aren’t the one latest hiccup for the brand new model of Ark. Rampant dishonest by PC gamers ( who you’re) led to the short-term removing of crossplay whereas Studio Wildcard works on higher anti-cheating options.
“We apologize to our Home windows gamers however we really feel that is one of the best plan of action for the well being of the sport,” the studio mentioned. (That is extra like the usual dry messaging we count on.)
These points comply with the poorly-handed runup to launch which included delays and pricing confusion because the remaster went from free to bundled for $50 to bundled once more however for $60, earlier than finally deciding on a $45 price ticket (and not using a bundle). General the launch has been a little bit of a multitude, however the identical might be mentioned for the unique Ark, and that finally offered hundreds of thousands of copies and have become one of many largest survival video games ever. We’ll keep watch over the remaster to see if it will get straightened out.