Aberration Release, Turrets, PlayAnywhere, Holidays, and Black Friday!

Happy Tuesday, Survivors! Normally our news posts go out on Friday, but we've got some exciting and also important news to share today. Let's go!

Aberration Release Date!

We are excited to announce we have a release date for Aberration: December 12th of this year. 

All of us here at Studio Wildcard have been working diligently to progress through the Aberration workflow in anticipation of getting it into your hands. Aberration will be an ARK experience unlike anything survivors have seen so far. We hope you are all as excited as we are for its release!

Update on Turrets

A few days ago we announced a big change to the game wherein we would be limiting the use of turrets within a radius on our Official Servers. We have been keeping track of all the feedback, reading all the threads, and we understand that this is an important change. Therefore, we'll be making some modifications to our initial plan in order to deal with the concerns that have arisen, as well as ensure a smoother transition to the new turret system for all players. Here's what's going down:

We are no longer hard-limiting turrets on the 5th of December, that timeline has changed. We still plan to hard-limit them, but it'll be pushed further out now that we'll be introducing a new kind of turret into the mix. Here's the new plan:

PC players can expect the new "Heavy Turret" on the 27th, it will launch with an active server-side turret limit specifically for "Heavy Turrets". We'll take the time to monitor player feedback and our official servers to see if there's anything that we missed, so then we'll have time to consider how to fix and address those concerns. This means that if you're over the visual limit on your regular Auto Turrets, you'll be fine (for now). However, you won't be able to place the Heavy Turrets, unless you're within the limit. We recommend taking advantage of this time to slowly transition your base to using the new Heavy Turrets over the old ones. 

When Aberration releases on the 12th December, it will have the turret hard-limit enabled on that map from the get-go. This means that neither regular Auto Turrets or Heavy Turrets can be placed on Aberration above the limit. After some time -- likely in the latter half of December -- this change will be enabled on the other maps, however, we'll be providing 2 weeks notice beforehand so you can make any adjustments as necessary. The idea is that you can immediately use the Heavy Turrets in the meantime to prepare for the change while ensuring your base remains well-defended.

Console players can expect to see the arrival of the Heavy Turret when the Aberration launches. By this time, the Heavy Turret would have gone through multiple balance passes. The reason we opted to take this route is that we want to make sure it's in a good state before it went live on the console. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to rapidly iterate as we do on PC, due to the cert process. Console will ultimately follow the same hard-limit activation as PC, albeit several weeks after the hard-limit is activated on PC.

For those who hadn't seen some of our previous dialogue on the change, you can check out this short blurb post by Senior Technical & Gameplay Designer, Kayd Hendricks (aka TheRightHand). He covers what are our current thought-processes are, as well as shares some information that we had discussed previously.

Quote

Turrets 3: The Turret... ening.

So, more stuff to talk about with regards to turrets. It's a party and everyone is invited!

We've had a couple of pow-wows and hammered a few more things into stone, I just want to share them in kind of an official capacity as well as do a round-up of everything you need to know if you're just tuning in:

- We found and identified that super dense clusters of turrets have been causing our servers to literally grind to a halt. In the worst of cases, a base full of turrets was causing a 400-500ms per tick delay on the server. (The entire rest of the game only takes up about 240-250ms in the worst cases. This means the turrets were costing up to twice as much as the entire rest of the game per server tick.
- We're implementing a limit on the number of turrets you can have in a given radius. This radius is 10,000 Unreal Units (Which is about 100 meters). Picture attached shows a 10,000 uu sphere for visualization.
- New BobCorp Automated Laterally Attenuated Nano-Cell Electronic Defense system will be available on the 27th of this month on PC, to allow players to start replacing their existing turrets.
- Heavy Turrets will require normal turrets to craft.
- Heavy Turrets are currently designed to be about 4-5x as powerful as a normal turret.
- Stego Armor Plating is being made much less effective.

The above are things that are guaranteed to be happening when we roll out these turret limiting changes.

Here is stuff that's on our list to test and consider further:

- Veggie Cake balancing.
- Tek Turret needs to remain top-dog turret.
- Is there anything we can further do to lower the cost of each turret to allow us to safely increase the number that players can place.
- Knockback for some/all of the bullet-firing turrets?
- % health damage on tick for Plant Species? (Slow poison? Prevent healing?)
- Throwing explosives from the backs of dinos? 
- Can we further weaponize bees?

We're still reading all of the threads that are up and as we decide we're /definitely/ going to do stuff, I'll write up another post about it. 

Expect the new turret on the 27th, and then all of our intrepid community members can make builds with them and if there's anything that they find that we missed, yay we'll have time to consider how to fix those things as well.

Note: Xbox and PS4 will not be receiving these turret changes until after Aberration has been released.

I know it's not a big post but I figured I'd be consise. 

You can see more details in my other threads:

WHY:

WHAT:

Keep on surviving!

 

Additional News!

PlayStation 4 SIEA (Americas) Season Pass Skins

Great news guys! Sony has enabled the skins on the backend and they should be available for players to acquire in game! As Sony marks the Season Pass bonuses as DLC, players will need to head into the PlayStation Store via their console dashboard and download them (they're free!).

Xbox Play Anywhere

In addition to the Aberration update, barring any cert issues, Xbox will receive the Play Anywhere update on December 12th. This update will allow crossplay between the Windows 10 version of ARK and the Xbox version. Survivors will be able to choose to allow crossplay on their unofficial servers or non-dedicated sessions with a simple checkbox on the host menu. 

Holiday Events!

We'd like to wish all survivors out there a Happy Thanksgiving and hope that have a great weekend! As for our plans, we will not be hosting an event for Thanksgiving this year due to our efforts being focused on Aberration and getting it out in December. We apologise for the lack of event this time of year, we love hosting holiday events, but unfortunately, we just didn't have the time to do so. Though, with Christmas around the corner, you won't have to wait long for a special Christmas themed Holiday Event!

Black Friday ARK Sales!

With Black Friday coming up, ARK: Survival Evolved will be having multiple sales across retail and digital for all platforms!

The following prices will be in effect this Friday in North America:

Wal-Mart (US Stores) - $29.99 USD (a discount of $30)

GameStop (US Stores) - $34.99 USD (a discount of $25)

EB Games (Canadian Stores) - $39.99 CAD

ARK is also currently on sale in the Xbox Digital Store until 11:00 AM GMT on Tuesday, November 28th, 2017:

 ARK: Survival Evolved - 25% off

Scorched Earth - 35% off

Explorer's Edition - 30% off

Season Pass - 25% off

ARK is also available on sale now with early access for PS+ members and will be on sale on the 23rd of November for everyone else until Black Friday (27/11). Please note that the discounts may vary based on your region.

ARK: Survival Evolved

Scorched Earth

ARK: Explorer’s Edition
 
ARK: Season pass
 
Complete your ARK Season Pass

ARK will also be participating in this year's Steam Autumn Sale! It'll run from now until 6 PM on the 28th of November!

ARK: Survival Evolved

 ARK: Season pass

That's it for this post guys! As always if you want to keep up with the latest news be sure to follow us on:

Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark

All the best,
Studio Wildcard