Studio Wildcard’s ARK 2 has been in development for… a while. A long while; since 2020, in fact. Originally penciled in for a 2022 release date, the year is now 2025 and fansstill don’t have a playable versionto enjoy.
Three years beyond the game original release date, Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz (co-founders of Studio Wildcard) speak out on what’s keeping their fusion of futures and pasts firmly outside our present.
At its core, the answer is ‘ambition’. “Occasionally you’ll see a game come out where it’s actually quite solid, but it feels like it’s two or three years behind the curve,” Stieglitz says in an interview withPCGamesN. “You just feel like ‘man, if this had been released four years ago, it would have been a huge hit.’ You don’t want to be that game.”
As they pushed development forward, slowly but surely, technology would improve around them. Not wanting to be left behind, needing to ensure their game felt innovative, they’d rather delay the project than release something that didn’t have the quality they wanted.
We feel like we’ve got one shot to really make this what people [want] and what we are expecting it to be. We want to do it right.
Ark 2 has quite a few “must-haves” that the studio won’t let it ship without. Among them is thesoulslikecombat system, something that the studio says is “very difficult” to include alongside player-vs-player considerations. “You could probably count the number of games on one hand that have even attempted that in an actual PvP context.”
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Vin Diesel’s role in ARK 2 is, evidently, a passion project for the famed Hollywood actor.
Then comes the idea of user-generated content, something that “must” be in the game at launch. “I would never, ever launch a survival game without UGC, and I would never launch a cross-platform game without UGC at this point.”
And then, of course, you have the antagonistic forces of NPCs looking to take the player down a peg. “Ark 2 has to have NPC antagonists, because that’s been implied by the trailer and has been part of our design for quite some time.”
Ark 2’s Development Has Been Slow, But It’s Never Been Forgotten
According to the interview, Studio Wildcard had “a pretty cool vertical slice” of Ark 2, even before the release of Ark: Survival Ascended. But growing that slice into a full cake has proven much more troublesome. “We felt that as a team, it would be very difficult to follow that all the way through to a complete game with both our experience level and [our scope] as a company.”
“We put the vertical slice on hold a couple of years ago to make Ark: Survival Ascended, and we’ve been only nibbling at it since then.”
While development so far has been mere ‘nibbles’ instead of a full feast, Studio wildcard does know roughly how long it would take to bring the game to market, assuming they went all-hands-on-deck to get it out the door. It would take “18 months of hardcore team focus to [turn] that vertical slice into an early access game.”
An early-access release of the game is something Stieglitz hopes to release in “the next two years.” Whether or not that desire becomes reality depends on how quickly the studio wants to shift focus away from Ark: Survival Ascended.
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The sequel to Ark: Survival Evolved still doesn’t have a firm release date.
