Now that ARK: Survival Ascended has had just over a week since its early access launch, it seems like a good time to check in on how things have been going for the dinosaur survival sandbox, and for the most part things appear to be typical in terms of launch woes and a mixed bag in terms of player sentiment.
We’ll start with the aforementioned launch matters, which saw Studio Wildcard release multiple servers and plenty of patches to address performance, crashes, bugs, and server stability. Wildcard also put out a dev blog last Friday that condensed the studio’s efforts and announced the game’s devkit release.
In terms of player engagement, SteamDB reports an all-time peak of just over 98K players at once on Steam specifically, with its 24-hour peak cresting 77K and just over 54K players online right now at the time of this writing, which is a far cry from the all-time 248K Evolved hit at its highest peak on Steam. The Steam reviews are “Mixed” at the moment, with many complaining about performance matters or using the platform as a way to continue to get angry at Nitrado.
“Mixed” can also be summarized as the sentiment on Reddit as players ask general questions, share some bugs and performance complaints, and at least in the case of one player, confirm how talking about an otter can get you kicked out of Steam community discussions.
