Late last night, Studio Wildcard finally released the Unreal Engine 5 remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved. Now known as Ark: Survival Ascended, the popular dinosaur survival game has been “reimagined from the ground up into the next generation of video game technology”. But, despite the fancy new visuals, players are already bashing the game on Steam due to its poor optimization.
Ark: Survival Ascended was already off to a rocky start following its announcement earlier this year. Not only was Survival Ascended originally priced at $50, but it received heavy backlash for the lack of DLC packs included in the bundle. Studio Wildcard later went on to rectify this decision, but also delayed the release by 2 months.
The studio stated that Survival Ascended would be released sometime in October, but as the month began drawing to a close, fans started to become more and more irritated by the lack of news. But things seem to going from bad to worse for Ark fans, as the game has finally launched on Steam with what some fans are calling “trash” optimization.
At the time of writing, Survival Ascended has over 300 Steam reviews with an overall “mixed” rating. However, even a majority of the positive reviews are still calling out the game’s stuttering frames and general poor optimization. One user, who actually gave Survival Ascended a positive review, still referred to the game as “Ark: PowerPoint Ascended”.
Various other reviewers scored the game negatively, with one player stating, “Frames are trash even on low settings with a 3070ti”. Another echoed the same thoughts, saying, “RTX 3080 and can only get 50fps on LOW settings, this is in no way, shape or form a better game.” Others had even higher specs, but are still reporting drastically low frame rates.
To make matters even worse for Ark fans, Studio Wildcard has also delayed the console release of Survival Ascended into next month. In a recent blog post, the studio said that it had “identified some critical issues in the multiplayer version of the game that would have had major implications for the console versions of the game.” As such, Ark: Survival Ascended will now be released for Xbox and PlayStation in November, but an exact date was not provided.