Yesterday I had the chance to speak with Doug Kennedy, CEO of Studio Wildcard, the company responsible for Ark: Survival Evolved. Needless to say, that game’s heady brew of dinosaur riding and tree punching has been a remarkable success–and ranks among the few survival games to leave its stint in Early Access. 

But it hasn’t been without controversy. The release of Scorched Earth, Ark’s first major expansion before the game had launched proper, was a sticking point among its playerbase, as were other factors such as the game’s price increase when it finally hit 1.0. But generally speaking the game is being played and enjoyed–it’s sold a whopping 11 million units across all platforms, which can hardly be attributed to player ambivalence.

On Early Access

With all that in mind, would Studio Wildcard use Early Access again? With the notable exception of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Early Access projects have struggled to meet the profile and success of titles like Ark–as well as others such as DayZ and Rust, which remain unfinished. The initiative has an undeniable stigma in 2017, and yet Kennedy’s answer to whether the studio would take that route again is a resounding yes.

“We will absolutely 100% use Early Access for our next project,” Kennedy said. “I enjoy it because it allows us to onboard our hardest of hardcore fans and stay in tune with them, and to give them a voice inside a game that’s being developed. 

“I’ve seen a lot of games go into Early Access and fail miserably, for a variety of reasons,” Kennedy continued. “We came up with an exceptional concept, we developed a great game. We listened to our fans: there isn’t anyone in the industry better than Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz in terms of staying in front of the fans, talking to them, developer diaries, developer logs, listening. We also manage it from a standpoint of: we have numerous community managers, and we listen to everything. There isn’t a single thread that we aren’t paying attention to. It doesn’t mean we respond to everyone, but we listen to them all, and when we roll out a new expansion pack or update or anything that’s a major change in the game, our community guys are tireless, they stay up days in a row: is there a bug? Is there an issue? What needs to be fixed?”

Kennedy says studios hoping to simply make a buck off an unfinished game shouldn’t go near Early Access. “It’s like having the world as a testing facility, but the problem is–and this is just my personal take–that a lot of people look at it as a means to get money early, and sell a game while they continue to develop. If you’re not listening to the community, if you’re not updating them with what’s going on and what the vision is, where you’re taking it, whatever the vision is, if you’re not doing that there’s no purpose for going into Early Access. Developers really should think long and hard about whether that’s the right place for their game to be. If they’re only going there to raise money early in development, it’s the wrong reason to be there.”

On reviews

I mentioned to Kennedy that Ark currently boasts a “mixed” status on Steam, both for most recent and older reviews. That’s not a particularly good look to newcomers of the game, though it’s a much better look than DayZ or The Forest in terms of games with very vocal playerbases. Do players of Early Access games feel more ownership of a title, and are thus more likely to be critical?

“They do feel more ownership,” Kennedy said. “It’s a balancing act. If you’re new to Early Access and you come on to play a game, and you’ve paid $29 for a title, and you’re expecting a polished game, you’re not going to give it a great review. 

“I’d love to see a line in the sand drawn: I’d love for it to be: here are all the Early Access reviews and here are all the post-launch reviews. I’d like to see some kind of equation that says, alright, now come review our game. We’re going to let you review it twice: once before it ships and once as the finished product. Because really, I’ll use a car example. Come and review our car. People love the body style but they get in and there’s no engine. So how do you want to rate the car? That’s kind of an extreme but that’s the mentality of it. No one knew how big the car was going to be when we were building the game. 

“But it’s the first game I’ve ever worked on that I haven’t worried too much about metacritic and scoring,” he continued. “Because I knew that we were catching some flack about things like bugs – but we didn’t put it through playtesting, we put it out there and then we fixed things. That’s what Early Access is.”

On Survival of the Fittest

Given the overwhelming success of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds–also an Early Access game–I asked Kennedy whether the studio had any further plans for the Ark equivalent, Survival of the Fittest. The short answer? It’s a “strong possibility”.

“Survival of the Fittest was a great idea, and I can tell you that we will continue to do something with it,” Kennedy said. “I look at it in this manner: it is not a trivial job to just dive in and say ‘hey we’re going to do a competitive battle mode’. We built it, we put it in the marketplace, and I keep talking about consumer quality and making sure you’re following through. It’s great to play it, but if we’re going to run tournaments, with competitive modes and cash prizes etc, we have got to be fully buttoned up. 

“We had to make a decision when we put that out there: do we continue to try to run the tournaments and dedicate a ton of development resource to support this or do we develop the [main] game, release an expansion and ship a complete product? When we put SotF back into the marketplace, whenever we do that we should put it in the marketplace so that it’s spectacular and it attracts users and we have a development team to support it. We’ll need a marketing campaign, a tournament team, and everything else necessary for it to be a Triple A battle mode game. We learned a lot by putting it out the way we did. Mainly what we learned was that we have to do it with 100% commitment and do it right.”

On the future

As for the future of Ark, the studio’s goal was to release three major expansions for the main game (the second, Aberration, releases next month), but more may follow depending on player engagement and demand. In addition to Ark Park and Pix Ark, the studio has other plans too: unannounced plans. “We’re very concerned about quality, experience, and making sure we’re not just tossing stuff out there.”

On punching trees

Finally, I asked Kennedy the question I have always wanted to ask a spokesperson for Studio Wildcard (or indeed, any other survival game): have you punched a tree before? Alarmingly, the answer was “yes”.

“In real life? Actually I have,” Kennedy said. “It’s not one of my prouder moments, but as anyone who reads this interview will now know, I have actually punched a tree before. It’s a long story. I’m not taking any credit for the tree punching in the game, but it did hit close to home when I first did it in the game. [laughs]”

The dinosaur-riding survival game Ark: Survival Evolved is chugging along nicely, with about 40,000 people playing it at this moment (a daily peak of 56,000, according to Steam Charts) and a big new expansion called Aberration set to come out later this month. But nothing is forever, and creative director Jesse Rapczak told DualShockers recently that in the relatively near future, Studio Wildcard is going to start looking ahead to a sequel. 

The developers aren't actually working on a followup yet, to be clear: Rapczak said Studio Wildcard has "a bunch of great ideas" for Ark, and it's currently in pre-production on a new expansion that's expect to be out sometime in 2018. But beyond that, it's harder to say. 

"I think, you know, as we get down the line, over the next year or two, Ark needs to have a sequel at some point," Rapczak said. "It’s definitely gonna be on our minds about when it’s the right time to something like that." 

It will be interesting to see how that prediction holds up. The game industry is heavily dependent on sequels, there's no doubt, but the real question is whether Ark is more akin to Call of Duty and Battlefield, which come and go with near-clockwork regularity, or Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends, games that are starting to look as though they'll outlast the mountains.   

Either way, before all of that comes Aberration, with a new movement system featuring ziplines, wingsuits, and climbing picks, and a whole new underground world. It's a big change, but it looks very promising. 

I've been a bit skeptical about stepping into the world of Aberration—the next expansion for dino-survival game Ark: Survival Evolved, due out this month. Aberration takes place in a different world, one where the only inhabitable spaces are underground due to the extremely hazardous conditions on the surface, where there's no atmosphere and even sunlight itself is deadly.

As a sci-fi concept it sounds cool, but the thing is: I'm just not much of a cave guy. I think caves in games can be nice places to visit, but the thought of spending all my time underground in a game isn't really appealing to me. It's not a claustrophobia thing, I just like being outside (virtually, I mean—in real life, not that much). One of the joys of Ark is soaring above mountains and forests on a winged dino, enjoying the blue skies and shimmering sunlight off the water. The base game has several of its own caves and caverns, and they're cool to visit from time to time. But the idea of playing Ark underground around the clock felt like it could be a bit stifling.

I got a chance to try a build of Aberration last week, and I'm definitely feeling much more optimistic about the expansion.

Aberration isn't just Ark crammed into a cave. It is a bit dark down there, obviously, but some caverns are so massive it essentially feels like standing outside under the night sky. I feel like learning the underground map will be trickier—on The Island map, landmarks like the volcano are helpful when orienting yourself—but during my time in Aberration I didn't really feel like I was underground except in a few areas. There's plenty of room down there.

More importantly, there are new movement systems in Aberration, and even just ninety minutes of fumbling around with them has me kind of excited. It's still Ark, but it already feels very different.

With new movement items like ziplines and winged glider suits, you'd think climbing picks wouldn't be the star attraction. I mean, they're just hooks. But the picks are easily my favorite addition to Ark's tools. With a pair of craftable climbing picks in your hands, the world, even contained underground, feels open. It's freeing to be able to scale rock surfaces and fort walls and giant tree limbs and pretty much anything you want to climb over, around, along, or on top of.

I rarely unequipped my climbing picks while running around in Aberration, and you can see why above: I missed a jump and still managed to hook myself on and claw my way to the top. Since the danger of falling to death is going to be such a big factor in these deep caves and chasms, you'll always want to have some extra picks in your inventory.

Ziplines, which you can fire across gaps with crossbows and then anchor with a second shot, provide another fun way of traversing the map. And you're not limited to just sliding down them. Craft a zipline motor and (provided it's got enough fuel) you can slide up ziplines as well as down.

There are no flying dinosaurs in Aberration, so you'll have to make do with gliding. Luckily, it's pretty satisfying. I'll definitely miss the convenience of hovering on a winged dino, but gliding adds a bit of immediacy and risk. You can get some lift while skimming through the air with your glider wings, but it's not at all like mounted flying and being able to carefully choose a spot to land. I got a bit better after some practice, but still had plenty of crash landings.

Combine these three new systems (after all the crafting you'll need to build these items) and you've got a fun way to get around the new underground biomes. If you're ziplining and you need to make a quick escape, you can drop off the line and glide away. Can't quite stick the landing? Get your climbing pick out and try to latch onto something while you plummet.

Naturally, climbing and gliding isn't restricted to just players. I got to ride a friendly Rock Drake during my time in Aberration, and I rode it straight up a sheer rock wall. The Drake can also perform a lengthy jump, great for transferring from the ground to walls, from walls to trees, from pretty much anything to pretty much anything else, provided you've got enough room. You can glide with the Drake, too, sailing through the air to wind up clinging to something else on the far side of the cavern. Just to sweeten the pot some more, the Drake is a chameleon, and can cloak itself (and passenger) in shimmery, semi-invisibility. 

Most of my time in Ark has been spent on a quiet private server with friends, so I don't have any raiding experience, but it's easy to imagine a tribe silently slithering up fort walls, clinging invisibly to cavern cliffs, and gliding in on a fleet of Drakes to stomp another tribe.

While in Aberration, I also had the honor of having an alien burst out of my chest cavity. There's a giant queen creature in the game that can implant players with her brood—I got a quick glimpse of her during my tour, and she's pretty terrifying. The incubation period is sort of amusing: as the creature grows inside you and you get closer to giving 'birth', your torso actually begins bulging comically (or horribly, depending on how you look at it). I was going to post a gif of the creature exiting my body in a spray of blood and wriggling away, but I think I'll let you discover it for yourself when Aberration is released.

I'm still not entirely sure I'll enjoy being underground all the time in Aberration—I still feel like I'll miss the sunlight, snow-capped mountains, and sparkling seas of the island map. But rock-climbing, ziplining, and gliding sure are a lot of fun. Even if I don't love the caves, I love getting around in them.