Wildcard Scraps Respawned Bundle, Survival Ascended now comes with all DLC!
After a week of backlash and skepticism from the Ark community, Studio Wildcard has made a statement in this week’s community crunch to address the concerns with the roadmap, give an update on the pricing for Survival Ascended, and give a few new details about the upcoming game.
They start off by saying “We appreciate your patience as we digested the feedback and consulted with our partners to revise our upcoming plans. As always, we’re very grateful to have such a passionate player base, and we hear and understand your concerns. We’ve decided to make some changes and provide additional information as to why we’re taking this approach, so please bear with us as we address some points.”
They then cut straight to the chase and tell us that they 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.”
The details of their new plans are laid out next, announcing that ASA will launch as a standalone package on every platform at $59.99 and will include all current DLC remastered and altered for the next generation. The Island, Survival of the Fittest and Scorched Earth will be available at launch, with the rest of the maps being released over time leading into 2024.
They address another point of contention next, offering an explanation as to why this went from a free upgrade to UE5 to a now paid completely new version of the game by saying “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. We weren’t going to maximize the potential of the new technology, we weren’t going to introduce new gameplay changes, and we weren’t going to make critical design changes that would have had an impact on existing save data.
After carefully considering what would be the best outcome for those who enjoy ARK: Survival Evolved and would want to continue to enjoy it in the years to come, we decided that our initial plan would not be sufficient. We want to provide you with an evergreen classic ARK experience, one that can continue to grow over time on a cleaned-up code base, making use of the new technological advancements not only in the industry but also in what we are working on with ARK 2.
We weren’t trying to mislead you with earlier comments; our plans and overall intentions changed. So you’re probably asking, why don’t we make these upgrades to the original ARK: Survival Evolved (ASE)? Frankly, it would not be viable. Many of the changes we’re making in ARK: Survival Ascended will touch a lot of aspects of the game; it’ll invalidate save data, some mods may not be functional, some things may not play the same way as they did before, and we didn’t want to change that experience for those who prefer it or are unable to upgrade.
This also impacted our decision to sunset the ASE Official Network offline on August 31st, shortly before the ASA launch. Despite ASE Officials representing the minority of players on ARK, it’s an invested and passionate group with attachments to their bases, tames, and characters, and seeing that go away can’t be easy. While we know it’s not the same, we hope making the saves available for unofficial use helps diminish the loss. Our reasoning behind the decision is that those servers are essentially based on old technology and require significant development resources and time for our teams to operate & maintain. In some cases, the issues aren’t as easily solvable without an overall upgrade. Additionally, we know that those resources could be better utilized on fundamentally new technology to further enhance the overall game experience for all players.
ASE will still be available to play for those who choose to; that includes multiplayer through unofficial/player-hosted sessions, the endless amount of mods on the Steam workshop, and all the game content as you currently know it. All of that is going to remain, but after 8 years of development, we have to make the difficult decision of sunsetting ASE and the Official Network in order to provide that truly long-term and evergreen version of the game through ARK: Survival Ascended.”
They then reiterate that they will be sending off ASE with one final content update for their eighth anniversary this June releasing the Rhyniognatha and mention the dossier will be out next week.
They continue on to say “they plan to support ARK: Survival Ascended with new features (including at launch), content drops, creatures, items, structures, and DLC. Our roadmap covered some of those planned changes, and we said there would be more, and here’s another preview:
Dynamic navigation mesh and creature pathfinding overhaul (AI pathfinding)
Photo Mode
Nvidia DLSS
Dino/Baby Management QOL
Wild Babies
Snap point improvements (new snaps, logic improvements)
Character creation & customization improvements
Cross-platform Multiplayer & Full Blueprint Modding (I know we mentioned this before, but we’re serious, it’s happening on PC and Consoles at launch, and we’ve got it working internally with Overwolf technology – this dramatically changes the nature of the console experience).
And this list is not exhaustive. We’re hoping to get even more done, and the only reason we aren’t covering all of those details right now is that we’re still working on them. It’s taking a significant amount of resources and time at the studio, and we don’t want to commit to other particular features unless we’re sure we can get them in for launch. And yeah, we may miss our deadline on certain aspects, but they’ll come in over time as we continue to support this next generation of ARK.
At the end of the day, these are just words and, frankly, may not mean so much. That’s okay; we understand what will really convince you is seeing screenshots and a gameplay trailer, and you will in time. We know there are going to be more questions, and we’ll be sharing more details over time. We’re not quite ready to pull back the curtains just yet, so we hope you’ll hang in there with us, Survivors. It’ll be worth the wait!”
I’m very happy to see that Studio Wildcard wasted no time addressing some key issues that were concerning a large portion of the community and seeing them scrap the Respawned bundle in favor of this all-in-one standalone bundle is a very welcome change from what we were told last week. With the announcement that the official servers will be shut down August 31st shortly before the launch of ASA and the previous announcement that ASA will be coming before the end of August we can be pretty confident to guess that we will see ASA on the 31st as well unless Wildcard decides to do Wildcard things and push it back.
What do you think of this news, has Wildcard addressed your concerns with ASA? Let me know in the comments!