Ark: Survival Evolved, in addition to launching from Early Access this week, announced a $45 season pass, which includes the Scorched Earth DLC as well as two unannounced expansions. We've now learned a bit about one of those expansions, called Aberration, which is set to arrive in October of this year. There's a trailer above.

The Ark (planet) in Aberration isn't quite as friendly to organic lifeforms as the one we're used to. The atmosphere has bled from the Ark and the sun is highly radioactive, meaning if you're going to thrive and survive it'll have to be underground in caves (at least until you've crafted some protective gear, we assume). Those caves, at least, look pretty.

Added to the mix are ziplines and wingsuits for traveling over pits and chasms, new weapons and armor, new items to craft, and of course a host of new creatures:

"Clamber up walls & glide through the air on the back of a camouflaging chameleon-like ‘Rock Drake’, keep the dark at bay with a friendly ‘Lantern Pug’, or grab and toss multiple creatures simultaneously with a massive ‘Cave Crustacean’, or -- if you are talented enough to tame one -- command the vile ‘Nameless Queen’ to impregnate your foes with a horrifying reproductive chest-burster!"

So instead of a prehistoric world filled with dinosaurs it's a bit more of an alien planet vibe filled with, y'know, aliens. Aberration will be priced at $20 standalone, or is included if you've bought the season pass. Have a look at some screens below.

Update: We reported a few minutes ago that Ark refunds were being allowed on Steam regardless of how long players had owned the game, or how many hours they had played. That was true for a while today, but Valve has fixed the issue, and the standard refund rules appear to be back in effect. Well, that's what I get for taking the time to test it out myself and attempting to obtain comments from the developers and Valve. I was late to the party with this story. Sorry, everyone!

Original story: A post on Reddit today claimed that Steam was allowing players to receive refunds for Ark: Survival Evolved—and that those refund requests were being honored no matter how long ago they bought the game or how long they had played it.

While the Steam refund policy typically only allows refunds if a game has been bought within the past 14 days and has been played for under two hours, several Redditors chimed in to say that they had received refunds even though they had purchased Ark in Early Access months or even years ago, and had played it for dozens of hours.

I asked another member of PC Gamer to attempt to refund Ark, and sure enough he received one despite having purchased the game in Early Access way back in 2015 and having nearly 30 hours of playtime logged.

Attempts to obtain a refund for the Scorched Earth DLC, according to at least one person on Reddit, were not successful. Refunds also don't appear to work for those who bought Ark as part of a bundle or from other key retailers.

It's currently unknown if the Ark refunds are intended by Studio Wildcard and Valve—a resetting of the refund time-frame window, as it were, since Ark left Early Access today. If intentional, I don't know if this is part of a wider policy to honor refund requests when a game leaves Early Access for full release, regardless of the date of purchase or number of hours played.

It seems a bit ripe for abuse: if someone has played Ark for dozens or hundreds of hours, asking for refund doesn't exactly feel fair at this point, but I don't make the rules, I just spend a lot of time staring at Reddit.

I have asked for more info from Valve and Ark's developers, and will update this post if and when I hear back.

While we've seen plenty of survival games enter Steam Early Access over the years, it's not often we see one actually leave. Ark: Survival Evolved, which arrived on Early Access back in 2015, has managed to buck the trend and is now a full release on Steam, at the somewhat controversial price of $60 (twice what it cost for nearly its entire EA run). We'll have a review up soon, in case you're not one of the five million plus people who already own a copy on PC, and in the meantime there's a launch trailer above.

It's been a long road for Ark, filled with lots of drama and several missteps, from a lawsuit that cost Studio Wildcard $40 million to the release of paid DLC while in Early Access to a separate battle royale mode that never found an audience. There was also the time the studio said it was withholding sheep unless it won an award, a stance that was pretty quickly reversed. Never, ever withhold sheep.

Studio Wildcard also introduced a fairly innovative sponsored mod program, wherein it pays modders a monthly salary and provides them support to develop new maps and mods, though in large part we're still waiting to see how that shakes out in terms of new content in the future.

You'll find Ark in the Steam store, along with a $45 (!) season pass for the Scorched Earth DLC and two upcoming and as yet undetailed expansions, one slated for this year and one for 2018.

Most patch notes are boring. Fixed a bug that stopped a menu from opening properly. D.Va's Defense Matrix doesn't last as long. Wukong's attack speed is 10 percent slower. That's the usual stuff, chronicling important but dull balance changes across years of a game's life. And then there are patch notes like this: "Added cat butchery." "Made all undead respectful of one another." "Tigerman does not have ears."

That's the good stuff.

Those are the kinds of wonderfully crazy patch notes Dwarf Fortress has given us over the years. Determined to top the absurdity of Dwarf Fortress's bizarre changelogs, I put on my deerstalker, grabbed my magnifying glass, and set out to find the strangest patch notes in the history of PC gaming. These absurdities are the result. 

Rimworld

Alpha 12

• Colonists will visit graves of dead colonists for a joy activity. 

Alpha 16

• New alert: Unhappy nudity 

Alpha 17

• Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors. 

---

Conan Exiles

Patch 15.2.2017

• Rhinos should no longer try to walk through players 

Patch 15.2.2017

• Emus now give less XP 

Patch 23.02.2017

• Players can no longer use chairs to travel great distances 

Update 24

• Imps, ostriches and other non-humanoids no longer go bonkers if you hit them with a truncheon 

Update 25

• Seeing dead people can now lead to great rewards 

Update 28

• Fixed a small issue where a player in some instances could walk underwater. 

--- 

Rust

Update 149

• Bucket no longer hostile to peacekeepers 

Update 152

• Pumpkins only have 1 season (instead of 7) 

August 28, 2014

• Bald inmate digging grows hair bug fixed 

---  

Terraria

1.2.0.2

• The game will no longer look for the square root of zero. 

1.2.1

• Mice can no longer spawn in hell 

1.2.3

• Red Stucco no longer spreads corruption. 

---  

The Sims 4

02/04/2016

• Sims carving pumpkins or working at a woodworking table will no longer ignore Sims who die near them. 

02/04/2016

• Babies will no longer send text messages congratulating your Sims on their marriage, engagement, or pregnancy. 

01/12/2017

• Confident children will no longer get a whim to practice pick-up lines. 

05/25/2017

• Babies will no longer change skin tone when they are picked up. 

---  

Don't Starve

January 29th 2013

• Darts and poop won't magically accumulate at the world origin. 

October 1st 2013

• You can no longer trade with sleeping pigs. 

November 19th 2013

• You can properly deploy or murder captured butterflies 

---  

Ark: Survival Evolved

254.9

• Beers can no longer be eaten by Dinos 

---  

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

1.2

• Taking items from dead owned creatures is no longer a crime 

--- 

World of Warcraft

1.3.0

• The quest NPC Khan Jehn no longer becomes confused and unresponsive 

1.4.0

• Roast Raptor now has an more appropriate inventory sound 

2.1.0

• Fixed an error where some characters appeared to be drinking while standing up 

2.4.0

• Zapetta will no longer become confused about whether the zeppelin in Orgrimmar is arriving or leaving 

3.1.0

• Yaaarrrr! now has a detailed tooltip 

--- 

Uplink

1.314 

• Fixed : Dead or jailed people don't answer their phones 

1.35 

• Fixed : LAN Spoof progress graphic overflow 
• Fixed : Time freezing and unclickable buttons on computers running for several weeks

--- 

Everquest

July 10, 2001 

• Reevaluated the values of the various fish fillets 

--- 

August 15, 2001 

• The Giant Tree Flayer is now Large instead of Tiny 

December 6, 2001 

• Fixed a bug that was preventing characters from being bald 

--- 

Two Worlds 2

1.4

• Horse behaviour - improved 

--- 

Battlefield 1942

1.2 

• Bots do not jump in and out of vehicles anymore 

--- 

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

1.02 

• Dead party members will no longer show up later in the game. What with thembeing dead and all 

--- 

Black and White

1.1 

• The word "Death" no longer said when villagers die of old age
• Creature doesn't become constipated if you punish him for pooing 

--- 

No One Lives Forever 2

1.3 

• Fixed problems with camera rotation after slipping on a banana 

--- 

Hitman: Codename 47

Patch 1 

• Dancer in "Gunrunner's Paradise" is no longer confused by dead bodies 

Nvidia's software engineers seem to have worked overtime on the company's GeForce 385.41 WHQL drivers. The "Game Ready" driver package brings support and optimizations to half a dozen games, whereas as Nvidia usually focuses on just one or two.

If you own a GeForce graphics card and are planning to participate in the Destiny 2 open beta that kicks off August 28 and runs until the end of the month, you will want to install this driver package. Other games that Nvidia focused on include PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, ARK: Survival Evolved, F1 2017, Pro Evolution Soccer 2018, and Quake Champions (Steam Early Access).

That is quite the list. In addition, you will find new or updated SLI profiles for ARK: Survival Evolved, Destiny 2, Faith of Danschant, Lawbreakers, Secret World Legends, and Starpoint Gemini Warlords. And if you're gaming on a laptop, the latest driver release introduces Whisper Mode profiles for F1 2017 and Destiny 2. Beyond that, there is a 3D Vision profile for Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 that is rated as "Excellent."

While Nvidia's engineers spent a lot of time optimizing code for several games, they only got around to stomping out a single bug. For GeForce GTX 970 owners playing Lawbreakers, the 385.41 driver release addresses an issue that was causing a drop in framerates.

You can download the driver package here. For Windows 10 64-bit, the download is around 436MB. And if you're using an AMD GPU, there are also Destiny 2 AMD drivers available.