Yesterday, Wildcard's dinosaur extravaganza Ark: Survival Evolved finally launched after two years in early access development. Things didn't get off to the smoothest of starts, however, with several unforeseen technical issues leading to the game's official servers coming online later than expected. Eventually, that issue was resolved, but players almost immediately ran into another: There simply don't appear to be enough servers to go around.
Remember when Studio Wildcard said it was going to wipe the Ark: Survival Evolved servers prior to launch, and then it said it wouldn't? Well, now it's going to wipe some of them -- and it's withdrawing customer support for surviving servers after the retail version hits August 29. Is your head spinning yet?
On Monday July 17th, we received an email about Ark: Survival Evolved, offering an interview with its developer Studio Wildcard to discuss a major change. Wildcard would today announce, we were told, that all official game servers would be wiped at launch, despite previously pledging that this would never happen.
In anticipation of the game's retail release, Ark: Survival Evolved developer Wildcard has increased the price of its popular dinosaur survival game on Steam from $US29.99 to $US59.99. This makes sense considering it will be officially available on August 8 as a full retail game. So far, it's just been in Early Access.
Early-access darling Ark: Survival Evolved is nearing completion. Studio Wildcard told Kotaku that it will finally give the game a proper launch on August 8 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, with an Xbox One X version coming on November 7. It will even have two collector's editions.
Ark: Survival Evolved is getting some proper achievements on Steam in next week's big update, most of them pulled directly from the console versions. That's great, kind of. As much as I love this dinosaur-themed survival time waster, it can lack direction, and achievements can give a bit of direction to an open-ended sandbox game. But Ark's achievements are pretty blah.
Ark: Survival Evolved's long-dormant volcano, situated near the centre of the game's Island map, is about to blow, and developer Wildcard is strongly suggesting that anyone in the immediate vicinity kindly steps out of the way. (But you'll want to go back later.)
Good news for egg fans playing Ark: Survival Evolved on consoles: Ark's second annual Easter event, Eggcellent Adventure Part 2, is slated to hit PS4 and Xbox One on Monday, April 24. That's more than a week later than the PC update, and also a week following actual Easter.
