29th of August stands firm?

[BeardO]

2 minutes ago, GP said:

Ray of sunshine aren't yee. 

lol it's just my honest opinion.  I'd hate to see people get all excited for "release" when there isn't much that is really going to change from today.

[GP]

1 minute ago, BeardO said:

lol it's just my honest opinion.  I'd hate to see people get all excited for "release" when there isn't much that is really going to change from today.

Yeah I know. 

I'm excited, but not because of any possible changes or developments, I'm just excited to see it emerge from Early Access. It's been a long 2 years.

[BeardO]

8 minutes ago, GP said:

Yeah I know. 

I'm excited, but not because of any possible changes or developments, I'm just excited to see it emerge from Early Access. It's been a long 2 years.

That I am happy about, At least for me it's been a fun, long 2 years

[HalfSlabBacon]

6 minutes ago, BeardO said:

Sorry if I don't share your excitement, been playing the game since release so yay more creatures I probably won't use, an extra boss is cool but again not "game changing".  Optimizations are great, but my system runs the game good now, doubt I will ever see more than a 10% gain so what another 5-6 frames?  Wee.  I've played on Rag since it's release on the workshop so yeah excited about that, but it has nothing to do with the release of the game, Jackson is just chugging along on it.

Ark will continue to be ARK, there is nothing that is going to be vastly different about it.  AI changes would have done that, devs already said maybe later.

 

I too have been playing since almost release and find most of the stuff added during this period has totally changed the game and kept me coming back.

I don't see how it hasn't changed for you.

Beaver, Dire Bear, Wyvern, Kapro, New Caves, Leaches, Thyla, Thero, Tuso, Tek, Alpha Mosa, Redwoods, Tree forts, underwater bases... These were all game changers.  I think you know I can give more examples if you've been playing as long as you say.

Remember when Mammoths and Reindeer were must have tames? When the Quetz was super OP and king of the sky? When the raptor was actually one of the best early game tames? They keep changing things, and my guess is it continues. ?

[BeardO]

4 minutes ago, HalfSlabBacon said:

I too have been playing since almost release and find most of the stuff added during this period has totally changed the game and kept me coming back.

I don't see how it hasn't changed for you.

Beaver, Dire Bear, Wyvern, Kapro, New Caves, Leaches, Thyla, Thero, Tuso, Tek, Alpha Mosa, Redwoods, Tree forts, underwater bases... These were all game changers.  I think you know I can give more examples if you've been playing as long as you say.

Remember when Mammoths and Reindeer were must have tames? When the Quetz was super OP and king of the sky? When the raptor was actually one of the best early game tames? They keep changing things, and my guess is it continues. ?

I think you misunderstood, I never said the game hasn't changed.  It definitely has, what I said is nothing they are planning on doing between now and release will change the game.  It's possible they swing the nerf bat again and that changes the game, but I can't see to many people being excited about that lol 

[Rep]

I can say for certain that the release date....

Video Graphics Driver failed, please make sure your drivers are up to date.

[EternalUniverse]

9 hours ago, xLunacy said:

Personal Opinion

I believe it will hold as long as their major update is able to get through tomorrow/this week. From what I'm getting, they're heavily relying on it to bring the game to a stable state. Plus, postponing the release again would be a PR nightmare and damage their reputation a lot.

To be honest, They already damaged their reputation as it is. From early access PAID DLC's, to bad server connection, bad rendering, bluescreen, crashes. I could go on.

[HalfSlabBacon]

5 minutes ago, BeardO said:

I think you misunderstood, I never said the game hasn't changed.  It definitely has, what I said is nothing they are planning on doing between now and release will change the game.  It's possible they swing the nerf bat again and that changes the game, but I can't see to many people being excited about that lol 

Geeze BeardO, don't be such a Negative Nancy ?... Wildcard is pretty proven to be unpredictable and like to throw surprises like curve balls. Have a little faith!

[BeardO]

Just now, HalfSlabBacon said:

Geeze BeardO, don't be such a Negative Nancy ?... Wildcard is pretty proven to be unpredictable and like to throw surprises like curve balls. Have a little faith!

Faith in WC????  I suppose you have swamp land in Alaska to sell me as well   By all means be excited for greatness upon release, I personally will just continue to play a game I enjoy the way it is and not worry about the 29th being a day of exciting game additions and changes.  I won't be disappoint if nothing changes...will you?

[HalfSlabBacon]

2 minutes ago, EternalUniverse said:

To be honest, They already damaged their reputation as it is. From early access PAID DLC's, to bad server connection, bad rendering, bluescreen, crashes. I could go on.

I love it when people throw the paid DLC thing out there. 

You realize it was a massive success right???

Concurrent players went up, game sales went up, it gained Wildcard a ton of free advertising, it provided the studio with a huge influx of cash, and the overall consensus from those that bought it was that it was totally worth it. The reviews of Scorched in media were also good.

The only negatives were the writers and steam users criticizing the charge for it. On that note, there's an old saying in the business world... ANY publicity, is good publicity!

It was a bold move, but actually a very smart one, and opened the door for other indie devs to do the same.

[AlphaCarno]

Theres something I really don't understand about the ark files. I fresh installed it and got a 20.5 GBs download. When I click properties on the ark files it says its still 98 GBs. Not sure if it displays stuff wrong or what. But With my internet speed it would have taken more then 2 hours to download a full 100.

[EternalUniverse]

6 minutes ago, HalfSlabBacon said:

I love it when people throw the paid DLC thing out there. 

You realize it was a massive success right???

Concurrent players went up, game sales went up, it gained Wildcard a ton of free advertising, it provided the studio with a huge influx of cash, and the overall consensus from those that bought it was that it was totally worth it. The reviews of Scorched in media were also good.

The only negatives were the writers and steam users criticizing the charge for it. On that note, there's an old saying in the business world... ANY publicity, is good publicity!

It was a bold move, but actually a very smart one, and opened the door for other indie devs to do the same.

I don't care if it was a "huge" success. It is and will stay a bad move from them. If you look it in a way, small indie devs can now easily make a game with lots of bugs, release it and charge 60 bucks for it with paid DLC while still in EA. its bad.

 

If every indie developers did this then there will be a huge problem in the future. Games will become crappier and so on.

[HalfSlabBacon]

5 minutes ago, BeardO said:

Faith in WC????  I suppose you have swamp land in Alaska to sell me as well   By all means be excited for greatness upon release, I personally will just continue to play a game I enjoy the way it is and not worry about the 29th being a day of exciting game additions and changes.  I won't be disappoint if nothing changes...will you?

No, of course I won't be disappointed, I enjoy the game way more today then I did back in 2015. I still think the new additions coming are pretty cool though, and look forward to them. I also look forward to whenever I see Ragnarok fit to add to my server. We're not there yet, but it gives me something to look forward to after I finish everything on the Island.

[HalfSlabBacon]

1 minute ago, EternalUniverse said:

I don't care if it was a "huge" success. It is and will stay a bad move from them. If you look it in a way, small indie devs can now easily make a game with lots of bugs, release it and charge 60 bucks for it with paid DLC while still in EA. its bad.

Why shouldn't indie devs be able to when the AAA guys do it all the time?

At least the good indie devs give you more than the same crappy & broken 10 hour game you bought last year, and actually continue to support it after release.

How many hours you got in ARK? Got your 60 yet? Not that you payed that much. ?

Personally, I've gotten more hours from Ark & Minecraft then I have any other games ever. That's including Ocarina which happens to be my favorite of all time.

If paid DLC makes it possible for unique games like these to keep coming out and keeps the devs financially viable during development, they can take my money! 

Lord knows they're bringing more to the table then the big boys!

 

[Ulta]

To the OP, yes I'm fairly confident that 29th is the legit release date. The game has gone gold, which means every version of ARK, console version and Steam, are all pass cert for release. The only reason it got delayed from the 8th to the 29th was cause one of the console companies took their sweet time getting it pass cert. Now that they all are ready, there's literally nothing stopping them.

However, that doesn't mean the game will be playable day one on release, so personally, and as WC has said, I wouldn't have booked time off for it. But hopefully the servers will function okay so your time won't be wasted. If your goal is to get on the new servers then there should be plenty to choose from and hopefully the Island and Center ones will fill up slower than Rag ones and thus be less laggy. But I wouldn't expect a clean transition. Day 1 activity is gonna spike and if you are gonna play on official, then be prepared for lots of lag if their official servers continue to be how they are now.

But if you go unofficial, then you'll probably have a grand time

18 minutes ago, EternalUniverse said:

I don't care if it was a "huge" success. It is and will stay a bad move from them. If you look it in a way, small indie devs can now easily make a game with lots of bugs, release it and charge 60 bucks for it with paid DLC while still in EA. its bad.

It's only bad in your eyes, so that is your opinion, not fact. SE was a success to WC and to the players who bought it. And me personally, did not find the move all that weird. It was more content for us to buy if we wanted, and nothing in SE really puts an advantage over players who didn't buy it. I didn't even buy SE, and I was hindered none by not buying it. SE was not a pay-to-win, so really the only thing WC sacrificed was time to work on it, and even THEN, we don't know how much time had to be deviated to it, so we can't really be angry at them needlessly when we have no idea how impactful working on SE was in relation to working on the main game. WC needed to make something to get them some extra cash because of a lawsuit that they had to pay off. I can think of waaaaaay worse things to do than feverishly make some awesome content for players to enjoy and ask to pay some money for...SE was gonna come eventually, we just got it earlier than anyone, even WC, had expected.

So yeah...SE's release being a bad move is your opinion. Not fact. If SE's release was as terrible a move as you are saying, then Ark would be failing hard right now. And it's not. Heck it's probably thanks to SE's resulting earned funds that we're getting MORE servers on release. So really, you should be thankful, because if WC didn't have that extra money, all your official servers would have been wiped clean and all that EA progress would be gone.

[BeardO]

My understanding about SE is a third party worked on it for wild card and it was planned to be released with the base game.  The base game got delayed and they decided to toss it out early mostly due to the lawsuit.  But doesn't much matter, I thought it was a poopty thing to see a game in early access sell a DLC, but I bought it so it apparently didn't bother me too much lol  Fact is even in ea, ARK has been a great game even with bugs and balance issues.  So whether they waited until full release to offer the DLC or put it out early really makes no difference in the long run.  I think my biggest beef with it was I didn't want to see other small companies, or larger ones for that matter, seeing WC being successful releasing paid DLC while the game was in ea and adopt that business model.

[CyanicEmber]

20 minutes ago, BeardO said:

My understanding about SE is a third party worked on it for wild card and it was planned to be released with the base game.  The base game got delayed and they decided to toss it out early mostly due to the lawsuit.  But doesn't much matter, I thought it was a poopty thing to see a game in early access sell a DLC, but I bought it so it apparently didn't bother me too much lol  Fact is even in ea, ARK has been a great game even with bugs and balance issues.  So whether they waited until full release to offer the DLC or put it out early really makes no difference in the long run.  I think my biggest beef with it was I didn't want to see other small companies, or larger ones for that matter, seeing WC being successful releasing paid DLC while the game was in ea and adopt that business model.

Third party? It was internally developed. You can literally see them working on it in the behind the scenes vid they released early last year. It was 100% Wildcard.

And frankly, I very strongly doubt that the timing of it's release had even the slightest thing to do with the lawsuit.

[Ulta]

10 minutes ago, CyanicEmber said:

Third party? It was internally developed. You can literally see them working on it in the behind the scenes vid they released early last year. It was 100% Wildcard.

And frankly, I very strongly doubt that the timing of it's release had even the slightest thing to do with the lawsuit.

There's been evidence to the contrary on your statement. SE WAS released to try and debuff the hit WC took from the lawsuit. Many interviewed with WC have said such.

But at this point we are very off-topic from the OP's post. We should drop this and get back on topic, yeah? There's other topics talking about SE's release and the lawsuit, but frankly it's a very old topic by this point and has very little to do with ARK at present. Many don't talk about it anymore at this point cause it's irrelevant.

You are right though, SE was made by WC 100%.

[Z0mbie]

9 hours ago, Edenprime said:

I sure hope it gets released at 29th. As xLunacy said, it would be a PR nightmare. Also I think they would lose a lot of potential players and money if they pushed it again. Even with that in mind, I think it would be a worse deal for them to release a game that doesn't work rather than push the release date again. Bad press from a buggy game seems worse than bad press from a pushed release date in my opinion. Just look at Mass Effect Andromeda for example

 

Studio "PR Nightmare" Wildcard.  I'm sorry miss but as you can see "PR Nightmare" is Wildcard's middle name.

[CyanicEmber]

22 minutes ago, Ulta said:

There's been evidence to the contrary on your statement. SE WAS released to try and debuff the hit WC took from the lawsuit. Many interviewed with WC have said such.

Do you have a source? I never saw such an interview and I wouldn't mind having a clearer picture of what actually went on...

[Ulta]

6 minutes ago, CyanicEmber said:

Do you have a source? I never saw such an interview and I wouldn't mind having a clearer picture of what actually went on...

It is moreso a 'piece together a puzzle' kind of thing, but here. this Reddit user explains it best, since any direct interview with WC doesn't specifically say 'Yes we released SE in EA because we needed money'. But a lot of evidence points to that being some of the reason.

https://www.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/510hnn/why_scorched_earth_had_to_cost_something/

Any direct questions regarding SE from waaaaaay long time ago have been met with statements like this from the devs. This is something Jat said in the same announcement that introduced the Kentrasaurus. (

"We'd also like to provide our official take on the Scorched Earth Expansion Pack, and the future of ARK. Put simply: we are absolutely committed to driving aggressive development towards a solid, feature-robust game launch for ARK: Survival Evolved. Everyone at Wildcard wakes up every day thinking about how we can make ARK into a better game today than it was the day before. It’s not always easy, but our intent is ever-forward progress towards a retail release that will  be far more ambitious in scope and features than our original vision when we launched ARK into Steam Early Access in June 2015. Your feedback enables us to continually expand the game to become better than ever!

Scorched Earth: Our original vision for ARK always included the creation of Expansion ARKs, along with the infrastructure and technical systems to transfer data dynamically between live ARKs. We determined that it is more sound to iterate on these systems during Early Access than after retail launch, given the significant risks involved if we didn't "get it right". While that meant unveiling the first Expansion early, it also means an easier time integrating further post-launch Expansions into the ARK network. We understand that this isn't everyone's cup of tea, and we appreciate the enjoyment people seem to be getting out of this initial view of how Expansion ARKs can work. Now that we have the systems in place to support them, we can ensure minimal integration issues with subsequent releases after ARK: Survival Evolved itself has launched."

So basically, dev's are saying they wanted to try DLC in EA because they wanted to see if they could even do it well, but putting the price tag on it seems to be because of the lawsuit. At this point though, the why's and hows are kinda pointless. We got SE, it costed money, and people liked the content enough. It helped WC get back some of the lost money, and we got fun new content that wasn't pay-to-win. As long as WC doesn't do another stupid that led to that lawsuit, then we're fine.

Honestly though I highly doubt this'll become a trend for EA games, due to how mixed received SE was for WC on a publicity standpoint. But in my opinion, it's really not a big deal, so long as the DLC isn't a pay-to-win cash grab. And SE was definitely not that, so WC did probably the smartest move with SE they could given their options.

[CyanicEmber]

Interesting. My working theory is actually that Snail Games covered most if not all of the lawsuit costs... Buuuut I could be wrong.

[1david25]

11 hours ago, Spookz said:

Greetings Fellow survivors,

I took some time off at work for the previous official release date (August the 8th). This was so that I could host a good old fashioned LAN party with some Fellow Danish ARK players. Unfortunately the release date was pushed back, which was very annoying seeing as me and my friends had already taken time off at Work. No hard feelings though.

We are planning to do the same for the 29th of August, so the question is actually really simple: Does this date stand firm no matter what? It would be really appreciated if an official could confirm. I do realise that the term "no matter what" might be overkill but hopefully you get the point.

Would be very sad to once again arrange it with work to take time off -  just to see the release get pushed back once again. I understand that guarantees are hard to give but I am still hoping for a firm answer on the subject.

All that aside I am really thrilled about the official release. The game is great :-)

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely yours,

SpookzDK

Should be on schedule

[Insomniak]

3 hours ago, BeardO said:

The game has been out for awhile now, it's not going to be magically better on "release".  Think of release day as nothing more than available to pick up in the store.  HAve your lan party now and you'll get just as much enjoyment as you would for "release".

While I agree with most of that my spidey sense is telling me we may get a couple surprises on that 1.0 patch 

[Insomniak]

34 minutes ago, CyanicEmber said:

Interesting. My working theory is actually that Snail Games covered most if not all of the lawsuit costs... Buuuut I could be wrong.

Probably not. Wildcard is actually Snail Ark.. they are a division of snail games USA, and snail games is their parent company. I'm guessing they had to foot the bulk of that noncompete themselves from an investor standpoint, 20 mil in lost capitol doesn't look good on the parent company's books. Off topic- Btw please reader, anyone, never sign a noncompete.. in most cases it just means that your potential company sucks hard enough that they know you can, and will do better elsewhere.