Were you anticipating a wipe ahead of the formal launch of ARK: Survival Evolved in August, especially given all the recent exploits? It’s not happening, Studio Wildcard announced today via press release, “despite a recent rash of cheating and hacking within the game,” which is an odd sort of way to put it. But the studio does have a plan, and that plan seems to be to let everyone voluntarily reroll on clean servers:
“In addition to continuing to operate the legacy servers, on launch date the studio will roll out a fresh cluster network of servers running new code and infrastructure explicitly designed to prevent such issues from occurring in the future.”
Update: This move is in apparent contradiction to the game’s original plans (privately announced earlier this week) to wipe it all as both Kotaku and PC Gamer are reporting. (Thanks Ceder!)
Wildcard also announced that the Ragnarok official mod will launch on console on August 8th alongside the full release and that it’s partnered with Nitrado for player-run custom server hosting on console “available at a very low price.”
The studio previously announced a $59.99 base price for the PC version of the game, a fee game dev Dean Hall called “****ing outrageous.” The game has been in early access on Steam for several years at a lower price and famously sold an expansion while in that test mode. Most recently, we chatted with ARK composer Gareth Coker about his work on an ever-changing early access title.
