Today in ‘things you saw coming a mile off’, players of the early access survival game Ark are pretty pissed that the unfinished game has a new “completely finished” expansion on the way, and have forced the devs into explaining themselves.
Last week it was announced that Ark: Survival Evolved would be getting a fully rounded and complete expansion called Scorched Earth. The problem? The game is still in early access and hasn’t actually been finished yet.
Naturally, the reveal was met with a wave of backlash by people who think that developers Wildcard should probably get the base game tied up before tacking on any extras.
This caused the game’s Steam reviews to swing from Mostly Positive to Mostly Negative pretty quickly, forcing Wildcard to make an official statement on the matter.
Community Manager Jat said in a blog post on the game’s website:
Put simply: we are absolutely committed to driving aggressive development towards a solid, feature-robust game launch for Ark: Survival Evolved. Everyone at Wildcard wakes up every day thinking about how we can make ARK into a better game today than it was the day before.
It’s not always easy, but our intent is ever-forward progress towards a retail release that will be far more ambitious in scope and features than our original vision when we launched ARK into Steam Early Access in June 2015. Your feedback enables us to continually expand the game to become better than ever!
Scorched Earth: Our original vision for ARK always included the creation of Expansion Ark [packs], along with the infrastructure and technical systems to transfer data dynamically between live Arks. We determined that it is more sound to iterate on these systems during Early Access than after retail launch, given the significant risks involved if we didn’t ‘get it right.
While that meant unveiling the first Expansion early, it also means an easier time integrating further post-launch Expansions into the Ark network. We understand that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and we appreciate the enjoyment people seem to be getting out of this initial view of how Expansion Arks can work. Now that we have the systems in place to support them, we can ensure minimal integration issues with subsequent releases after Ark: Survival Evolved itself has launched.
tl;dr – deal with it m8. You can pick up Ark right now through Steam and Xbox One, with a PlayStation 4 release planned soon.
Mark is the Gaming Editor for UNILAD. Having grown up a gaming addict, he’s been deeply entrenched in culture and spends time away from work playing as much as possible. Mark studied music at University and found a love for journalism through going to local gigs and writing about them for local and national publications.