Ark Survival Ascended: Same Dinos, Shinier Graphics, $45 Remake
After eight years of fighting Dinos and building houses that could protect us from them. Ark Survival Evolved got a remaster in the form of Ark Survival Ascended. Ark Ascended brings a lot of improvements, both based on very common mods, as well as an upgrade to the newer Unreal Engine 5. You thought Ark looked great when it came out? It looks even better now!
Table of Contents
The Island: Beach Massacre Remastered
The OG map returns mostly unchanged. Beach spawns still could mean instant death while veterans know almost every rock. There are a few map changes so far, but most of The Island has stayed the same that your usual strategies will still work. And yes, there is still a Carnivore Island and a Herbivore Island!
Less experienced players will quickly find out why swimming equals suicide, as the depths of the ocean with sharks smalleing you from miles away make the move to Herbivore Island quite dangerous. But once there, it will actually make things easier.
Unreal Engine 5 makes raptors murder you in 4K and trees look photorealistic before vanishing into your inventory. Dynamic lighting showcases your corpse beautifully and the water quality has gone up several levels. Especially waterfalls make sense now.
Map knowledge remains the king of the jungle (or the beach). New players get the authentic 2015 experience: spawn, die, rage, repeat. While experienced players get to play around with some new buildings/structures or some old ones that have upgrades or adjustments.
Major Building Upgrades
Foundations finally rotate and adjust height and they also come with easier changes and upgrade systems so you do not need to delete and rebuild once you unlock better building materials. Foundations and ceilings also have new shapes, so you no longer need mods to get triangles as Wildcard finally spend some angrams on new geometry. All of this changes the building experience drastically, as there was a clear reason why some of these mods were so common.
Another major improvement, which we have seen more recently in other survival games, is that crafting pulls from nearby boxes automatically. Inventory Tetris ha sbeen retired with the Ascended version of Ark.
Graphics from Unreal Engine 5
UE5 turns Ark into an artwork of its own. The UE5 feasture: Lumen, makes caves visible even in darkness, but caves are still better to explore with a proper light source. And the feature: Nanite, will give rocks more polygons than your character had in Survival Evolved. Foliage is now bending more realistically, which is expecially vcisible right after being mauled by that Raptor in the "easy" spawn zone for low level. But with all those upgrades, computers do need to have a stronger GPU in order to properly render the game, and not turn it into a screenshot simulator. Truely "Ascended" is your hardware if you want to play this game on max graphics.
Crossplay and Mods on Console
Console meets PC, where Xbox griefers raid PC bases. As usual it seems the the PC is the Master Race, as Xbox can just not play the new UE5 graphics at max quality. Console are just not made to be for gamers anymore, these days. But something unique consoles have never seen before, is mods. Curseforge/Overwolf has done the thing and for the first time ever brought modding to console. The new Wildcard-implemented version of the CurseForge platform inside the game, actually means all mods on CurseForge for this game, automatically also work on the Xbox. Despite the hate they sometimes get, leave it to Overwolf to truly reinvent the wheel, and make it better!
Worth Your $45?
Newcomers get the "definitive" experience. Better building, prettier graphics, same suffering. Hundreds of hours of genuinely engaging content if you embrace the chaos. The Island provides endless emergent gameplay. Veterans? It very much depends on how much you love Ark. Survival Evolved will no longer be supported while they remaster this game, while you wait for Ark 2. But the Quality of Life improvements and visual upgrade justify it for a lot of dedicated players.
The loop remains nostalgic: Spawn beach. Die to dilophosaur. Respawn. Punch trees. Die to raptor. Finally tame dodo. Alpha rex eats everything. Rebuild on Herbivore Island until you have enough levels and power. Buy it on Steam now to get eaten!
