Ark 2's Future Is Looking More Bleak Than Ever Despite All The New Content

's continued development is giving players a lot to care about, but when it comes to its successor, it's a lot harder to be optimistic. Announced in 2020, is intended to be a major sequel to the classic experience. In the years since its announcement, however, most updates on the game's status are simply its release date getting pushed farther and farther away, and a large portion of the community has essentially shelved any hopes for the game to release soon.

In the meantime, was announced in March 2023 as a remaster of the original, bringing the game to Unreal Engine 5 and slowly rebuilding all the content released over the years on the new platform. Although suffered from its own delays, it did manage to materialize before the year's end, and it's continued to receive content additions since. The Summer Bash event recently added some new and old summer-themed items, and is set to expand the game more significantly in September.

The Center brought exclusive new features to Ark: Survival Ascended, but it also remastered some classic ASE locations that veterans are sure to love.

Although has a huge audience ready and waiting, the apparent viability of its release is only continuing to falter. The overhauled made sense as a way to bridge the extended gap between releases, but at this point, it seems to have taken over as the primary focus for development. Without any tangible progress being shown, it's hard to have confidence that much development is being invested in bringing to a completed state, and it may not be something that can wait forever.

Studio Wildcard, the company behind, has a turbulent economic history. As reported by , the studio made an allegedly $40 million dollar settlement in 2016 after being sued for a breach of a noncompete agreement, and the company sold to the parent publisher Snail Games somewhere in a similar time frame. Although most details of the arrangement are speculative, lead designer Jeremy Stieglitz confirmed the basic events in