In ARK Survival Ascended he says to himself “Ah,” he says, wiping the sweat from his brow. “That’s some mighty fine wood cabining if I do say so myself!”
Under a large tree, it stands, shaded from the sun on all sides with a cliff at its back, a wooden cabin worthy of the gods in this fine, tropical paradise. Behind him, water laps at the shore, sunlight twinkling across the waves in diamond showers. It only took five hours to build, but by god, it was worth it! The man had a castle and soon, an army to carry him across the land. Such were his plans, laid out surely in the days before when, suddenly, a mighty crack announces the arrival of a spinosaurus.
The dastardly lizard, paying no heed to arriving without an invitation, has breached the side wall and a cup of sugar was the last thing it wanted!
“Et tu, Spiny, et tu,” he said. “I’ll get you next time. . .”
Or perhaps the time after that? Or the time after that?
And so goes life in the marvellously tropical climes of ARK, where survival, conquest, death and running around in your boxers – and often dying in them too! – is the order of the day. Where the prehistoric past meets an SF future on a lonely, isolated island full of some of the most dangerous and largest predators the world has ever known.
Studio Wildcards’ popular, but flawed, ARK: Survival Evolved returns in a brand new, shiny remake with ARK Survival Ascended. Is this new version of ARK, now running on Unreal Engine 5, the game we’d all hoped Survival Evolved would be? Or has it brought the worst traits of its forebear kicking and screaming onto modern-gen machines with it?
ARK: Survival Evolved was a hugely ambitious title. And its ambition was only superseded by its performance flaws and bugs. There was no denying that, even on last-gen consoles, it was quite a pretty game, but it came with serious performance issues that even years of patching didn’t do away with. The bugs as well, remained. Old ones got fixed, new ones became evident and some just stuck around for the long haul.
Long load times, stuttering performance with massive frame rate drops, poorly thought-out menus and a user interface were just part of the issues you had to deal with. And that’s before we even get to the A.I. bugs, clipping issues and path-finding issues. Yet for all of that, ARK Survival Ascended was still intriguing and addictive. It managed to capture the crafting and survival genres’ trait of surviving against all odds magnificently with an addictive, one-more-go mentality.
This makes it a pleasure to say that ARK Survival Ascended has managed to iron out most of the game’s issues. Sure, some of the original problems still persist, but Wildcard’s update of their old game is nothing short of amazing and, dare I say it, transformative. In fact, this feels like what ARK was always meant to be.
ARK Survival Ascended’s core gameplay loop remains the same whether online or solo. You still have to break down items in the environment to harvest resources to start building a mighty survival empire. Hunger, heat, dehydration and limited resources are still things to contend with, along with the many critters hunting across the environment.
In solo play, you’re goal is to master the island and eventually defeat the world bosses. Online it’s much the same thing, with the added extra of playing with and against other players. You can play solo in MP but that’s usually a bad choice as most people band up into tribes, raiding each other’s bases and the like. It’s more PvEvP and not my preferred way of playing ARK Survival Ascended. I prefer the solo game myself but dip into the MP every now and then just to see what others have built.
Solo and MP games can still be heavily tweaked to give the exact experience you want. No more thirst? Done. More resources per object? Done. Faster taming? Done. Just about every part of ARK Survival Ascended’s experience can be customised to your liking. It’s also easier to do now with the redesigned menus and interfaces. Game types are broken down into MP, solo and modded ARK Survival Ascendeds with each toggle spaced across gameplay menus that make sense. Survival Evolved players will remember that the original game’s menus were a massive chore to navigate with everything smooshed onto one page.
The in-game character menu is still the same though, broken down across multiple pages. There is a floating cursor now to easily move items around via drag and drop and pick tabs. A dropdown box also lets you separate your viewed items by type which is extremely useful. I don’t recall this being on the last-gen versions of the game.
Building and crafting, while the same, still feels improved in speed and efficiency of placing objects, with certain engrams containing nested items in one convenient place, such as walls which can be swapped between different types of walls and windows during placement.
Mod support for the console is also a thing now, with new environments, items, creatures and hacks to make life on ARK Survival Ascended a little more pleasant. At launch, there were thirteen pages of mods and as of the time of writing, this had blossomed to forty-two pages and I expect it to continue to grow.
The biggest change, however, is to the game’s visuals and its performance. ARK Survival Ascended is absolutely gorgeous. The game’s visual stars, its environment and creatures, have been wonderfully remade. The island is stunningly beautiful, featuring plenty of cliffs and foliage to make last-gen versions gulp in fear. The level of detail has been pushed through the roof in the landscape and it’s a pure joy to simply explore and see what’s just beyond the next massive tree or beneath that ominous-looking cliff. Foliage reacts to your character while trees fall over when chopped down.
The various creatures across ARK Survival Ascended look stellar now as well, featuring improved models and animations. Coming across your first, massive dinosaur is still a thrilling experience.
And the performance is stellar. The game boots up and loads incredibly quickly and I don’t recall much in the way of frame rate drops or stutters during play, even when I was been prodigiously perforated by a pack of piranha. Coupled with the visuals, and the amount of foliage and creatures running across the landscape, the stability is a dream. Dinosaurs hunt each other, sharks swim close to the beach and birds dive bomb fish from the waters. And, thankfully, nighttime isn’t pitch black anymore.
That said, ARK Survival Ascended isn’t entirely perfect just yet. Some old chestnut issues return. Creature A.I. and pathing can be finicky. I’ve seen dinosaurs trying to walk through walls, clip through each other and run around pointlessly in circles multiple times. I think there’s still a fair way to go before it feels like a truly living environment.
Buggy mesh placement also abounds, especially for groups of rocks that seem to float above the environment and, at least on Series X, there’s a noticeable amount of screen tearing. It’s not consistent but you can’t miss it.
While the performance on SP is great, MP does suffer though, regardless of whether you’re playing PVP or PVE. Screen tearing is more noticeable here and there’s a lot of pop-in on creatures with player-built architecture being the worst offender. This is definitely an area that ARK Survival Ascended needs more work in.
While ARK Survival Ascended still needs some more work, this is certainly the best version of the game to date and probably closer to the vision that the developers originally had. The fantastic load times, stable performance – in SP – and breath-taking visuals, coupled with the addictive survival and building gameplay loop are no longer hampered by the original game bugs and performance issues. Being stranded in your underwear on a tropical island – or riding a T-Rex in your underwear – is still as much fun in 2023.
ARK Survival Ascended Trailer
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