Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: ark, ark: survival evolved., entertainment, games, studio wildcard, video games

Ark Developer Responds To Criticism Of Selling DLC For An Early Access Game

Published Tue, 06 Sep 2016 06:54:23 -0500

Ark: Survival Evolved has found itself at the center of a controversy in the last week thanks to a rather bizarre move. The game announced and launched the DLC, Scorched Earth last week which rustled a lot of feathers as the game isn't out of Early Access yet.

That controversy isn't lost on the developers of the game either. In a blog post, Studio Wildcard explained that Sorched Earth is part of the expansion program. and that the developer wanted to do one before full release to help get it right. Here is what they said on the matter in full:

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 ARKs, 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.

This likely isn't going to convince people who didn't like the announcement to begin with, but I maintain, Ark is good enough and functuional enough, I think the DLC is fine. As an avid player, the promise of more and more content gets me exciting, so count me in.

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