Hello Survivors,

ARK: Survival Evolved on Twitch!

Hello Survivors,

Just a quick update! :D

Tomorrow we would love to invite you to come check out our twitch stream! It’ll take place at 2PM EST [11AM PST // 6PM GMT].

We shall be hosting a LIVE Q&A, to discuss the launch, our current plans for development, and what you can expect to see in the future! It’s going to be packed full of information so definitely do not miss!

The show will be hosted by Wildcard’s Jesse Rapczack, Community Manager Jat, and some other familiar faces in chat!

Don’t forget! We hope to be seeing you all there!

http://www.twitch.tv/survivetheark

Join us as we unravel the mysteries around the ARK and don’t forget to follow so you know when we go live!

Speaking of mysteries… Who’s that Dinosaur?

Hello Survivors,

ARK: Survival Evolved on Twitch!

Hello Survivors,

Just a quick update! :D

Tomorrow we would love to invite you to come check out our twitch stream! It’ll take place at 2PM EST [11AM PST // 6PM GMT].

We shall be hosting a LIVE Q&A, to discuss the launch, our current plans for development, and what you can expect to see in the future! It’s going to be packed full of information so definitely do not miss!

The show will be hosted by Wildcard’s Jesse Rapczack, Community Manager Jat, and some other familiar faces in chat!

Don’t forget! We hope to be seeing you all there!

http://www.twitch.tv/survivetheark

Join us as we unravel the mysteries around the ARK and don’t forget to follow so you know when we go live!

Speaking of mysteries… Who’s that Dinosaur?

This week is going to be a little different, when we posted our regular question thread to find out what you guys wanted to know, the majority of the responses were regarding the game, and the future of our Early Access Process.

Optimisation

This is one of the key issues that has been often raised all over the discussion boards and different social media platform. We can say that optimisation is the top priority for us, initially during the development phase most of our time was spent on content and game systems, giving players the opportunity to have things to do when they play the game. Now that there’s a solid amount of unique content in the game, hundreds of hours or more, we’re going to shift that technical focus onto optimisation. We have a team of very skilled and equipped engineers ready to perform their necessary updates and changes to ensure that we’re able to get the most FPS and PERFORMANCE out of all your hardware!

Through the coming days and weeks ahead you will all see a steady improvement in how well your computer is performing when running ARK: performance will go up, memory will go down. Also we have DirectX 12 to look forward to which will further increase the amount of performance in game by an approximate 25-30%, and on top of that with the introduction of DX12 and Windows 10 we plan to create functioning SLI which will make full use of your blinged-out gaming rigs.

The game isn’t capped at 30FPS. We want players to get as high as they want, it just hadn’t been optimized and this is what we’re tackling now. You’ll also see steady improvements made to the visual scaling employed by the lower graphical settings -- the high-end will look even-better as we integrate new rendering techniques, and so will the low-end!

Server Connection Issues

This has been a major problem since we launched as we initially did not expect the sheer amount of players that would be picking up ARK. We had thought we were handily prepared but turned out to be the opposite. This mass influx of players seems to mean you guys like our game and we’re incredibly grateful for that, but this also means that work needs to be done to setup much more servers, as well as provide you guys with the tools to set up your own to better host and maintain your custom ARK’s. We’re currently working on miscellaneous the other server issues that exist on top of that so hopefully everyone will be able to log on soon -- until you are all in the game, we will be working on it and at the fastest pace we can!

We’ve released some information on our boards to help some of you connect to other servers whilst we’re still in the process of figuring things out. Definitely follow this advice if you’re struggling to connect to a server:

Firstly, if you could open your Steam browser, on the top you'll see an option called View - hit that and then servers. Once you hit servers, a new box will open and there's a filter button at the bottom. Ensure that ARK is being filtered, then it should hopefully load a list of ARK servers. See if you can connect that way.

Another option is to use this fan-made website. You just click on the server's IP that you'd like to join and then it should launch the client via Steam. Might not work on all browsers though. Mind you, I manage fine on Chrome with it. http://arkservers.net/ or http://arkserverlist.com/

Another issue could be that you've updated the client and that particular server may not have updated, therefore you're unable to find it because you're on two different versions.

Patch Notes and Patching Schedule

There has also been a topic created for people to check out the latest Patch Notes here:

It’s not so detailed now, however once things calm down and we have more time, we’ll work on creating detailed notes, as well as publishing a Trello timeline for our longer-term battleplan and gathering feedback on it. Alas due to the rigors of launch day, the ARK Trello will be coming online a little later this week. As mentioned, you can expect an update at most every 2 days, and usually every day, and even more usually, multiple times per day. We will take care to not deploy server updates too rapidly, as they require restarting the game servers briefly. Server updates will be aimed towards twice per week, whereas client updates will be every day or every other day. Typically our patches are released in the evening Eastern Time, so, right about… now…..!

Forum Changes

We’ve begun work on changing up the forums, so there are now dedicated sections for you to provide your feedback, reports, promote your server services, as well as read the most recent announcements.

Transparency

There are a lot of posts all over the discussion board right now. Due to this and the problems we are working on internally there may occasionally a lack of activity on the boards, however keep in mind we aim to provide as much answers as possible.

The following threads posted in the general discussion area will contain useful information such as our development plans for the day, how you can connect to servers, custom server command lines and more! So please do check it out. Once things are more calm you will definitely see much more activity, however for now most hands are on deck and they’re working on the game!

State of the Game
Patch Notes
Wedneday the 3rd of June - Developer Plan

Closing thoughts

Those of you who haven’t been able to get into the game yet for various reasons, don’t worry: we’re working on every reported issue, and are dedicated to getting you straight into the game as soon as possible!

That’s all for now guys, thank you for being patient and I hope you’re all enjoying your first steps onto the ARK. It’s going to be a long ride, and it won’t always be smooth -- we appreciate everyone’s support, engagement, and feedback in the Early Access process -- but you can bet your last Stimberry that it will be exciting!

All the best,
Your Community Manager Jat

This week is going to be a little different, when we posted our regular question thread to find out what you guys wanted to know, the majority of the responses were regarding the game, and the future of our Early Access Process.

Optimisation

This is one of the key issues that has been often raised all over the discussion boards and different social media platform. We can say that optimisation is the top priority for us, initially during the development phase most of our time was spent on content and game systems, giving players the opportunity to have things to do when they play the game. Now that there’s a solid amount of unique content in the game, hundreds of hours or more, we’re going to shift that technical focus onto optimisation. We have a team of very skilled and equipped engineers ready to perform their necessary updates and changes to ensure that we’re able to get the most FPS and PERFORMANCE out of all your hardware!

Through the coming days and weeks ahead you will all see a steady improvement in how well your computer is performing when running ARK: performance will go up, memory will go down. Also we have DirectX 12 to look forward to which will further increase the amount of performance in game by an approximate 25-30%, and on top of that with the introduction of DX12 and Windows 10 we plan to create functioning SLI which will make full use of your blinged-out gaming rigs.

The game isn’t capped at 30FPS. We want players to get as high as they want, it just hadn’t been optimized and this is what we’re tackling now. You’ll also see steady improvements made to the visual scaling employed by the lower graphical settings -- the high-end will look even-better as we integrate new rendering techniques, and so will the low-end!

Server Connection Issues

This has been a major problem since we launched as we initially did not expect the sheer amount of players that would be picking up ARK. We had thought we were handily prepared but turned out to be the opposite. This mass influx of players seems to mean you guys like our game and we’re incredibly grateful for that, but this also means that work needs to be done to setup much more servers, as well as provide you guys with the tools to set up your own to better host and maintain your custom ARK’s. We’re currently working on miscellaneous the other server issues that exist on top of that so hopefully everyone will be able to log on soon -- until you are all in the game, we will be working on it and at the fastest pace we can!

We’ve released some information on our boards to help some of you connect to other servers whilst we’re still in the process of figuring things out. Definitely follow this advice if you’re struggling to connect to a server:

Firstly, if you could open your Steam browser, on the top you'll see an option called View - hit that and then servers. Once you hit servers, a new box will open and there's a filter button at the bottom. Ensure that ARK is being filtered, then it should hopefully load a list of ARK servers. See if you can connect that way.

Another option is to use this fan-made website. You just click on the server's IP that you'd like to join and then it should launch the client via Steam. Might not work on all browsers though. Mind you, I manage fine on Chrome with it. http://arkservers.net/ or http://arkserverlist.com/

Another issue could be that you've updated the client and that particular server may not have updated, therefore you're unable to find it because you're on two different versions.

Patch Notes and Patching Schedule

There has also been a topic created for people to check out the latest Patch Notes here:

It’s not so detailed now, however once things calm down and we have more time, we’ll work on creating detailed notes, as well as publishing a Trello timeline for our longer-term battleplan and gathering feedback on it. Alas due to the rigors of launch day, the ARK Trello will be coming online a little later this week. As mentioned, you can expect an update at most every 2 days, and usually every day, and even more usually, multiple times per day. We will take care to not deploy server updates too rapidly, as they require restarting the game servers briefly. Server updates will be aimed towards twice per week, whereas client updates will be every day or every other day. Typically our patches are released in the evening Eastern Time, so, right about… now…..!

Forum Changes

We’ve begun work on changing up the forums, so there are now dedicated sections for you to provide your feedback, reports, promote your server services, as well as read the most recent announcements.

Transparency

There are a lot of posts all over the discussion board right now. Due to this and the problems we are working on internally there may occasionally a lack of activity on the boards, however keep in mind we aim to provide as much answers as possible.

The following threads posted in the general discussion area will contain useful information such as our development plans for the day, how you can connect to servers, custom server command lines and more! So please do check it out. Once things are more calm you will definitely see much more activity, however for now most hands are on deck and they’re working on the game!

State of the Game
Patch Notes
Wedneday the 3rd of June - Developer Plan

Closing thoughts

Those of you who haven’t been able to get into the game yet for various reasons, don’t worry: we’re working on every reported issue, and are dedicated to getting you straight into the game as soon as possible!

That’s all for now guys, thank you for being patient and I hope you’re all enjoying your first steps onto the ARK. It’s going to be a long ride, and it won’t always be smooth -- we appreciate everyone’s support, engagement, and feedback in the Early Access process -- but you can bet your last Stimberry that it will be exciting!

All the best,
Your Community Manager Jat

Hello Survivors!

Welcome to the fourth issue of the ARK Digest! For those who missed the previous issues, check out the Announcement section on the Community Hub and be sure to catch up with what you’ve missed!

First off, we want to say to everyone who has purchased ARK: Survival Evolved, how much we appreciate your support and help to make this game the biggest thing to hit the Survival Genre since… well… dinosaurs! The player response has been tremendous, with over 100,000 units solid within just 12 hours of launch. For a small indie team like ours, this exceeded our wildest expectations and it just, frankly, blew us away. Thank you everyone! Rest assured that our commitment to you, our Survivors, is to make ARK the most amazing, transcendent video game survival experience in history -- or prehistory? -- is stronger than ever. This is is who we are, and we are going to build this game up together.

We’ve had a very busy week as you can imagine and have pumped out quite a few announcements, so definitely check those out if you haven’t so far! This weekly feature entails information regarding some of the development of ARK, your questions as well as any extra bits of information we want to share!


A new Dino Dossier has dropped, this one is everybody’s favorite versatile apex predator, the Spinosaurus!



Monday, Wednesday, Friday are still Dossier Drop Days, so get ready for another fantastic new addition to the ARK on Friday :)


A lot of the work in the last week has been for preparing for the Early Access launch as well dealing with the hiccups and challenges that arise with actually going live! As our engineers focus on optimization and bug-squashing, we still have the content team blazing forward, and soon we’ll be showcasing the various new content & features!

Mod Tools & UE4

We’ll be presenting our modding tools, as well as an example of a basic mod-map to go alongside it, called a “Raptor Rapture”, a simple wave-based survival mode. Definitely excited to show this so you can see what the UE4 Engine is capable of! Keep in mind this is a small mod, so what you’ll be able to produce can be much much more.

This Thursday, Wildcard Jesse will be appearing on Epic Games twitch stream, where he’ll talk about the game, the engine and more!

Upcoming patches

We’ve just hit v1.60 and are working through the steps of improving the technical game for its many players, members of the content team have also been developing the next set of goodies.

Some of this to be steadily rolled out over the coming weeks includes: custom per-pixel custom sign painting, expanded illness and weather states, Plesiosaurus, Spinosaurus, Meganeura, Shastasaurus, the mysterious Cave of the Hunter that didn’t make it into Early Access launch (there are of course already 6 major cave networks to explore in ARK currently, along with 12 underwater minicaves) -- and we can’t wait for you guys to encounter them, and much more, on your ARK soon!

Early Access Duties

Since releasing the game we’ve been working on improving performance, stability as well as connection issues. A few of these fixes have been deployed, but this work will be ever-present and ongoing, and just about every day you’re going to get an update that will take a step forward! Our commitment is to you, our player-base, to deliver nothing less than the ultimate large-scale survival experience that you can enjoy on your home computer of choice. We have an excellent veteran engineering team, and they will not rest until we get all the way there, together.

Hello Survivors!

Welcome to the fourth issue of the ARK Digest! For those who missed the previous issues, check out the Announcement section on the Community Hub and be sure to catch up with what you’ve missed!

First off, we want to say to everyone who has purchased ARK: Survival Evolved, how much we appreciate your support and help to make this game the biggest thing to hit the Survival Genre since… well… dinosaurs! The player response has been tremendous, with over 100,000 units solid within just 12 hours of launch. For a small indie team like ours, this exceeded our wildest expectations and it just, frankly, blew us away. Thank you everyone! Rest assured that our commitment to you, our Survivors, is to make ARK the most amazing, transcendent video game survival experience in history -- or prehistory? -- is stronger than ever. This is is who we are, and we are going to build this game up together.

We’ve had a very busy week as you can imagine and have pumped out quite a few announcements, so definitely check those out if you haven’t so far! This weekly feature entails information regarding some of the development of ARK, your questions as well as any extra bits of information we want to share!


A new Dino Dossier has dropped, this one is everybody’s favorite versatile apex predator, the Spinosaurus!



Monday, Wednesday, Friday are still Dossier Drop Days, so get ready for another fantastic new addition to the ARK on Friday :)


A lot of the work in the last week has been for preparing for the Early Access launch as well dealing with the hiccups and challenges that arise with actually going live! As our engineers focus on optimization and bug-squashing, we still have the content team blazing forward, and soon we’ll be showcasing the various new content & features!

Mod Tools & UE4

We’ll be presenting our modding tools, as well as an example of a basic mod-map to go alongside it, called a “Raptor Rapture”, a simple wave-based survival mode. Definitely excited to show this so you can see what the UE4 Engine is capable of! Keep in mind this is a small mod, so what you’ll be able to produce can be much much more.

This Thursday, Wildcard Jesse will be appearing on Epic Games twitch stream, where he’ll talk about the game, the engine and more!

Upcoming patches

We’ve just hit v1.60 and are working through the steps of improving the technical game for its many players, members of the content team have also been developing the next set of goodies.

Some of this to be steadily rolled out over the coming weeks includes: custom per-pixel custom sign painting, expanded illness and weather states, Plesiosaurus, Spinosaurus, Meganeura, Shastasaurus, the mysterious Cave of the Hunter that didn’t make it into Early Access launch (there are of course already 6 major cave networks to explore in ARK currently, along with 12 underwater minicaves) -- and we can’t wait for you guys to encounter them, and much more, on your ARK soon!

Early Access Duties

Since releasing the game we’ve been working on improving performance, stability as well as connection issues. A few of these fixes have been deployed, but this work will be ever-present and ongoing, and just about every day you’re going to get an update that will take a step forward! Our commitment is to you, our player-base, to deliver nothing less than the ultimate large-scale survival experience that you can enjoy on your home computer of choice. We have an excellent veteran engineering team, and they will not rest until we get all the way there, together.

Welcome home indeed!

First of all we’d like to thank you for being patient over the past few hours! We had to delay the launch just by a little bit to help ensure that when you guys do get in, it will be as smoothly as possible. Hiccups may occur as we roll-out ARK, but we’ll do our best to avoid them and will quickly rectify them!

So without further ado, we would like to extend our warmest welcomes to ARK: Survival Evolved’s Early Access!

Over the course of Early Access we will be shipping multiple updates a week. You can expect to see very rapid iteration and progress being made at a consistent rate. Working together we will be able to build something spectacular. Something that’s going to set the bar for future survival games, and dinosaur games! It’s going to be one hell of a ride! There will be a lot of polishing, content creation, and optimization going on throughout the entire process and in 2016 we’ll all have something truly amazing to show for it. We’re very eager to get going, and hopefully you are too!


We’ve got a super cool surprise for all our Founding Survivors!



The Early Access Limited Edition “Founding Survivor” Parasaur Saddle Skin will be gifted to all survivors who pick up an Early Access copy of ARK: Survival Evolved within the first two weeks. You’ll be granted one on every ARK that you join! Just a little thank you from the team for considering and supporting us in this Early Access phase… and there may be a little something extra too, be sure to check your in-game Inventory :)

…though that’s not all to get hyped about ;)


A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, and this one is out of this world! Introducing the eight-legged arachnid queen, the Broodmother!



Scary right? Best of luck to any survivors who manage to bring together the required tribute to summon her!


That’ll be all for this announcement guys! Be sure to check our some of the earlier ones we posted in case you’ve missed anything juicy ;). Looking forward to seeing everyone on the ARK over the next year! We’ll have a great time I’m sure! Thanks for reading and thank you for being so patient! We’ll have more news later in the day as Early Access rolls out, including information about hosting your own servers, how to keep them up-to-date, along with content and features we plan to roll-out in the next day!

Yours Truly,
Your Community Manager Jat & ARK: Survival Evolved Team

Welcome home indeed!

First of all we’d like to thank you for being patient over the past few hours! We had to delay the launch just by a little bit to help ensure that when you guys do get in, it will be as smoothly as possible. Hiccups may occur as we roll-out ARK, but we’ll do our best to avoid them and will quickly rectify them!

So without further ado, we would like to extend our warmest welcomes to ARK: Survival Evolved’s Early Access!

Over the course of Early Access we will be shipping multiple updates a week. You can expect to see very rapid iteration and progress being made at a consistent rate. Working together we will be able to build something spectacular. Something that’s going to set the bar for future survival games, and dinosaur games! It’s going to be one hell of a ride! There will be a lot of polishing, content creation, and optimization going on throughout the entire process and in 2016 we’ll all have something truly amazing to show for it. We’re very eager to get going, and hopefully you are too!


We’ve got a super cool surprise for all our Founding Survivors!



The Early Access Limited Edition “Founding Survivor” Parasaur Saddle Skin will be gifted to all survivors who pick up an Early Access copy of ARK: Survival Evolved within the first two weeks. You’ll be granted one on every ARK that you join! Just a little thank you from the team for considering and supporting us in this Early Access phase… and there may be a little something extra too, be sure to check your in-game Inventory :)

…though that’s not all to get hyped about ;)


A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, and this one is out of this world! Introducing the eight-legged arachnid queen, the Broodmother!



Scary right? Best of luck to any survivors who manage to bring together the required tribute to summon her!


That’ll be all for this announcement guys! Be sure to check our some of the earlier ones we posted in case you’ve missed anything juicy ;). Looking forward to seeing everyone on the ARK over the next year! We’ll have a great time I’m sure! Thanks for reading and thank you for being so patient! We’ll have more news later in the day as Early Access rolls out, including information about hosting your own servers, how to keep them up-to-date, along with content and features we plan to roll-out in the next day!

Yours Truly,
Your Community Manager Jat & ARK: Survival Evolved Team

Hello Survivors!

Thank you to everyone who tuned in and participated during the first reveal of ARK: Survival Evolved! We had quite a large number of you guys show up on Twitch, holding the number spot for a moment, with loads of tweets and messages being sent from all over and across multiple social media platforms. We appreciate all the feedback and messages we’ve received.


We will begin Early Access tomorrow as normal on June the 2nd, hopefully you guys will be able to pick up a copy at around 10AM PST, possibly a little later. As we get closer to hour-zero we’ll be sure to let everyone know :).
From all the feedback we received during the Closed Alpha Test, as well as the live broadcasting that happened today, here’s our response:


There were clearly a few hiccups when the initial stream began and there is a fair bit of polishing to do, we recognize this and we can assure you that this game will be polished quicker and development will be iterated on quicker than just about anyone has ever seen before. You will see fixes deployed quickly, discussion occurring constantly and constant flow of updates to improve the game. We’re serious about the game, we’re serious about development and we want to prove that to you.


What you guys saw on all those stream, well that probably only comprises 1% of the actual gameplay that is currently involved in ARK: Survival Evolved. Even in this first Early Access build, it can take hundreds of hours to explore the mechanics and depth of content, burrowing deep into the foundations of the ARK and up above the clouds -- trust me, I've done that! :P And that is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve only just started with you! Once more intrepid survivors dig into the meat of the game, this will become very apparent. Finally we’ll keep on adding to and improving the game, so that there's always something exciting for you to explore and conquer! We hope you will all join us on the ARK tomorrow, and take this journey with us!


A very clear issue that has been brought up is that performance isn’t great, graphics don’t look great on low and optimisation isn’t great. We know this, we won’t lie. What I can say is that this is going to be a priority for us for the coming weeks and of course throughout the project. We will continue to work on all of these aspects and you will see steady improvement. Performance will get better day by day, graphics across the spectrum will improve! The trailer was recorded a while back on a GTX 980, right now the game on maximum settings looks better than that! So if you’ve got a 980 or Titan you can definitely take advantage of it. There are new visual techniques that are now in the game that weren’t around when we made the trailer. Yes it is true that if you have a less powerful graphics card, you’ll find that your graphics aren’t as good but we will continue to scale up and do daily optimisations to ensure that the game look as good as it can!


A lot of people have raised concerns about the state of the discussion boards, whether developers will continue to be active, how we can keep the forums clutter free and what our general plans are. Once the game launches into Early Access, we will begin re-ordering the Steam boards

The discussion boards will be arranged as follows:

Announcements – This is the section of the boards are purely for announcements, here you’ll see new updates about new builds, massive features, sponsorships and partnerships, any announcements regarding attendance of conventions, dino dossiers, updates about anything majorly important!

General Discussion – This forum will generally stay how it is now, there will be fairly lax moderation however general steam guidelines apply, and pinned topics highlighting important updates and announcements as well as general chit-chat for the game. The way it’ll change is that it will no longer be for suggestions and feedback, but instead the new sections below will be used for that.

Suggestions and Feedback – This will be a moderated section for survivors to provide their feedback about the game. We would like to keep it constructive and generally avoid any trolly-posts. You’ll see a lot of activity here from the developers and we’ll lock and clean up threads as necessary. This will help us keep things cleaned and organized.

Bug Reports and Exploits – Similarly to above this will be a moderated section for survivors to post any bugs they’ve found in the game, loopholes, exploits so the team can discover them and work to fix them in a timely and organized manner.

Tribes – You won’t see much change to what there is now. A place to recruit for your tribe, or find a tribe to join. There will be fairly lax moderation, however general steam guidelines apply.

Community Content – Similarly to above, you won’t see much change. It will be a place for you to promote your content, your non-tribal groups, share any stories or fan-art related to ARK and it’s universe. The moderation will be lax but steam guidelines still apply.
Off Topic – Pretty self explanatory, lax moderation though you’ll be required to respect the steam guidelines.

Hopefully these changes will help us organize better and allow for much more constructive discussion in order to improve the game. We aren’t very strict, we won’t ban you unless you’ve really crossed a line. We just want to maintain some order to ensure that everything is going smooth.


A little bonus for you guys! We’re excited to announce that….

A new Dino Dossier is posted, this one is everybody’s favorite apex predator, the Tyrannosaurus Rex!



Have fun dealing with this guy in game ;)


That’s it for now guys, there’s clearly a lot of work to be done to hit the finish line in 2016 but we can assure you, we’ll hit it. The game will reach new heights, have hundreds of hours of content and hopefully we’ll be seeing all of you join us on the ARK, exploring every nook and cranny of this gigantic universe that we’re building, helping us refine it into the ultimate survival experience that in many ways it already is, and certainly will be!

All the best,
Your Community Manager Jat and the ARK: Survival Evolved Team.