It is a milestone 12 months for Ark, and Studio Wildcard is guaranteeing it is a memorable one. Celebrating the franchise’s tenth birthday, we have already seen Ark Survival Ascended add the remastered Ragnarok DLC to its suite of expansions and obtain an engine improve. The unique recreation, Ark Survival Advanced, can be getting an sudden new growth, Aquatica. However the icing on the birthday cake shall be Misplaced Colony, the primary all-new growth for ASA, which is about to drop in December. In an unique interview with PCGamesN, Studio Wildcard co-founders Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz reveal what it has been prefer to lastly inject some unique content material into Survival Ascended and focus on among the new options and improvements the extremely anticipated DLC will convey.
Ark Survival Ascended is already heavy with remastered expansions, and Ragnarok is the most recent. Including one among Ark’s greatest and most lovely maps, alongside a bunch of iconic creatures, its debut in ASA has resulted in a wholesome uplift of gamers. Nonetheless, for thus many Ark followers, it is a world they’ve seen earlier than – and that is why the prospect of Misplaced Colony is so thrilling. After I ask Stieglitz why hundreds of gamers nonetheless have not made the leap from ASE to ASA, one of many three core causes he provides (alongside tech restraints and time invested within the unique recreation) is that they need to see one thing correctly new. “They really need a motive, creatively, to reinvest their time,” he says. Nicely, the following growth will give them simply that.
“Persons are beginning to get just a bit style of it now with the Misplaced Colony Growth Move we launched [alongside Ragnarok],” says Rapczak – the cross provides a number of gameplay mechanics and creatures to the sport that may characteristic within the full launch of the growth, however extra on these later. “It is simply the tip of the iceberg. The entire map and all that new content material coming later is, I believe, actually gonna blow folks away by way of furthering the Ark story and tying it into what we plan to do later with these characters in Ark 2 and past.”
“Beforehand, the one actually, really unique content material we had launched for ASA was Bob’s Tall Tales, which was extra like a gameplay characteristic set,” Steiglitz provides. “It is like, ‘here is some cool gadgets and creatures,’ however it wasn’t like a brand new world or a brand new story.”
Given this radical change from remastering previous content material to creating one thing contemporary for a similar recreation, I ask if Studio Wildcard has suffered any whiplash from it, or if it has been an fulfilling expertise. “It is actually about dusting off the previous artistic expertise that the group’s been utilizing for extra quick time period enhancements, [but now] pondering extra long run about how we create a complete new world, complete new map, complete new characters, and new storytelling parts, and that is been actually rewarding,” Rapczak says. “It is one thing the group has been trying ahead to for a very long time.
“[We’re] increasing the best way we inform tales within the recreation. Lately, we bought a brand new mocap facility arrange at our Seattle workplace. We have been diving into Unreal’s new Metahuman toolsets for a few of our characters within the recreation. Jeremy has been getting quite a lot of our voice expertise from [Ark The Animated Series] and different areas to reprise their roles within the recreation, and our returning expertise has been very excited to return again and voice new content material for this growth. The group is having nice enjoyable constructing Misplaced Colony from the idea part up, unbounded by what we did earlier than [in Survival Evolved].”
Lots is already recognized about Misplaced Colony. As Rapczak alludes to, it’s going to characteristic iconic characters (and their well-known voice actors) from Ark The Animated Sequence. We all know that it will happen on Arat Prime, a frozen planet that lore-heads can have realized about a number of occasions through the years. And we all know that it’s going to tee up the story for Ark 2, the bold sequel that Stieglitz tells me should be a few years away.
As talked about, with the Misplaced Colony Growth Move dropping alongside Ragnarok, gamers can go hands-on with among the new gameplay adjustments early. Already obtainable proper now are the Drakelings (new miniature dragons that provide you with sturdy passive buffs), the Veilwyn tame, a brand new software that may save sections of your base as templates that you should utilize once more, and Ark’s first-ever participant talent tree.
“Although this may occasionally have severe long-term meta recreation impacts to how Ark works, [Lost Colony adds] a talent tree, which is a completely new idea in Ark however clearly exists in different video games like Path of Exile,” Stieglitz says. “However to actually do this in an intensive approach in Ark [means] going off in a really new course.”
As for what else is arriving in December, Stieglitz teases an unannounced characteristic making its debut in Misplaced Colony. It has been requested a good quantity through the years, and it is a core element of fellow survival recreation Conan Exiles.
“One of many concepts in Misplaced Colony is NPC thralls which you could sway to your facet, and the concept of having the ability to assemble a military in that approach is one thing that we have probably not experimented with in Ark,” he tells me. “[We’re] actually attempting to take care of human antagonistic NPCs in that house as properly. So it’s going to be very experimental. A few of it pertains to issues we additionally intend to [include] in Ark 2. It is, to some extent, a approach of seeing what works and what would not earlier than, you already know, a completely new sequel that actually cannot afford to overlook with a few of its mechanical experimentation. So Misplaced Colony affords us a barely much less monumental approach of getting to experiment with a few of these varieties of mechanics.”
Talking extra broadly, Rapczak notes that the world of Arat Prime can be “constructed round new varieties of gameplay we’re placing [into Lost Colony] that have not existed in Ark earlier than.”
Regardless of all of Wildcard’s efforts to push Ark’s gameplay ahead and make Misplaced Colony a genuinely new expertise that might draw extra gamers over to Survival Ascended, Stieglitz is aware of that it is vital that the group would not “lose sight of [Ark’s] roots.”
“We’re a creature survival recreation,” he says, definitively. “So there’s bought to be actually cool tames. They should be vital to how the map works and to traversing the map and to surviving the map. That at all times needs to be there. However inside that type of framework, what can we do to make the sport expertise have extra layers and depth that does not essentially take away from the creature side?”
As talked about, Ark Survival Ascended’s Misplaced Colony growth is because of launch in December 2025. It is arguably crucial second for Studio Wildcard since ASA launched, not just for the impression it might need on that recreation, however the way it will crack the door open to present us a glimpse of what Ark 2 may very well be – each by way of its narrative and its gameplay evolutions.