MOD SUPPORT is coming to the Epic Games Store version of ARK!

[chimpans]

MOD SUPPORT is coming to the Epic Games Store version of ARK!

 

August 30th, 2019 Epic's Trello Development Board:

https://trello.com/c/xqnzVcZz/27-mod-support-for-games

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August 30th, 2019:

We're actively starting development on supporting mods in the store! This is a huge feature which will take a long time to build. You won't be seeing proper mods support on the store until 2020, but work is starting now.

September 13th, 2019:

Catalog integration and presentation of mod discovery bare-bones completed.

October 11th, 2019:

Design exploration for mod management tools for developers and modders has begun.
Development of player-facing mod pages and the game mod catalog browse experience have completed a first-pass implementation using mostly mock data.

April 8th, 2020:

We've made great progress towards our first iteration of the Epic Games modding platform. We are currently doing quality assurance testing and polishing the experience. We'll be releasing support for mods slowly starting with one Store partner and ramping up from there.

April 29th, 2020:

(Screenshot of an example mod page:)

 

 

May 18th, 2020 Epic Newsletter:

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/development-update-self-refund-keyless-partner-integration-and-changes-to-ownership-authorization

(The existence of this newsletter is significant.  It's written by PR people, and is based on timelines the developers have told them. So they would not publicly announce "MOD SUPPORT SOON" here unless it's really coming SOON.)

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Development In Progress

Mod Support for Games
Players will soon be able to browse a catalog of player and developer made mods for their games. Players will be able to auto-install mods into games they own, that are managed by the Epic Games launcher or download the files separately for other games.

Achievements
The Achievement service for titles on the Store is currently in development. We look forward to sharing more information about the system soon.

 

 

Epic Games Store high-ranking developer's tweets:

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https://twitter.com/galyonkin/status/1262727688739061761

May 19th, 2020: "No plans for paid mods. It’s just an unfortunate choice of words."

(Meaning that all mods will be free.)

https://twitter.com/galyonkin/status/1266397338018480133

May 29th, 2020, in response to someone asking how often the Trello plan is updated, which confirms that the Trello information is always up-to-date: "We usually update Trello once a month, but I don’t have a date yet."

https://twitter.com/galyonkin/status/1267535060158296067

June 1st, 2020: "The achievements system will roll out in stages, starting with a very basic "I can view my achievements" step. Right now we are targeting Fall 2020 for the MVP."

(MVP = Minimum Viable Product, meaning the first shipped version of achievements. And Fall 2020 = The period of time between September 22 2020 and December 21 2020. So achievements are targeted to happen within that time-range...).

https://twitter.com/galyonkin/status/1267536517699903488

June 1st, 2020: "Mod support should come way sooner than achievements :)"

(Meaning that mod support will come to Epic Games Store somewhere between July 17th, 2020 (today) and September 22nd, 2020. Most likely sooner than later on that range since their mod support development is practically complete and is just being POLISHED to look/feel nicer, AND since Epic has already announced mod support as "coming SOON" in a public PR newsletter...)

 

 

Finally, ARK's own statement:

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/articles.html/community-crunch-225-crystal-isles-anniversary-event-epic-games-store-and-more-r1569/

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We’re hyped to welcome more Survivors to the ARK via our upcoming launch in the Epic Games store. For one week, players will be able to download a FREE copy of ARK for their personal library from the Epic Games launcher. Unlike “free weekends” the game will remain in your library for as long as you choose! Begin your journey on the island and see where the mysteries of ARK take you.

Other than modding, the Epic Store version of the game will operate like the Steam PC version and will be updated in full parity with our Steam updates. Both platforms will support crossplay, which will be enabled on our Official Servers between Steam and Epic Games and Unofficial Servers can choose to opt-into enabling crossplay or not.

Modding will not be supported at launch but we fully intend to have modding support enabled when the Epic Games Store supports it. For now, any servers that are set up to use mods will not display in the EGS version of ARK.

Now is the time to dive into the expansive world of ARK and begin an epic journey!

For those of you running dedicated servers, here's some info you need to know:

When running a Crossplay or Epic Game Store server, the VOIP software will be default to use the Vivox, an alternative VOIP plugin. For those using Steam only, you can continue to use Steam VOIP (default) or alternatively opt into Vivox.

Necessary Server Args:

-crossplay (enables Crossplay on Dedicated Server)
-epiconly (enables Epic Game Store only players to connect to the Dedicated Server)
-UseVivox (enables Vivox on Steam only servers)

Running a server with mods or without -epiconly or -crossplay will mean that the server will only accept player connections from Steam and not EGS.

 

So that's it. Game MOD support is coming to ARK for Epic Store within 1-3 months.

[chimpans]

Personally, I am very much looking forward to mod support just so that I can leave the laggy, lawless official servers and play on unofficial servers where there's actual "don't be an asshole" rules. ?

Official servers:

1. Zero admin support or rule enforcement, even of the official Code of Conduct. Everyone breaks those rules and nobody is ever punished.
2. It's a hellhole with obnoxious people and disrespectful morons everywhere.
3. Racists in chat.
4. Pillars and leftover traps littering the whole landscape.
5. Losing dinosaurs/tames just because you can't even build a trap due to all the trash structures people leave all over the landscape.
6. You can barely even build a base since there's pillars literally everywhere, just sitting there with nobody using that land.
7. Plenty of griefers on PvE placing their huge, tamed dinosaurs in your base to block your doors, with no way to kill those dinos since it's PvE.
8. And lots of griefers who kite massive dinosaurs like gigas and titans into your bases to make the wild dinos attack you and your base and your dinos, making the wild dinos destroy your base and kill all of your dinos.
9. Some griefers use grappling hooks and other tricks to glitch in through open windows in your base, then grabbing your body, and pulling your sleeping body out through windows, out of your base, drowning you, and looting your body.
10. Other griefers build pillars around your base just to prevent you from expanding your base.
11. Some griefers build traps on the exact respawn/new survivor locations, which make you spawn in a trapped box/geometry, unable to move, and starve to death inside their trap boxes.
12. There's zero protection against griefing. Griefers are not afraid of Wildcard whatsoever. They'll just tell you "you can report me as much as you want, they never do anything".
13. There are also tons of people with tribes that have hundreds of copies of dinosaurs to lag/crash the server just for fun.
14. Within a year of a new PvE server, there's tons of tribes who max out their tamed dinosaur cap and leave them all un-cryofrozen so that the server hits the Total Dino Limit (which is 5500 tamed dinosaurs in total no matter who owns them), and then nobody else on the server can tame or unfreeze any dinosaurs anymore and the server is "dead".
15. And official servers have absolutely constant lag, rubberbanding, server crashes and rollbacks.
16. There's a risk of complete deletion of your character and all progress and all imprinted dinos etc just because you "dare" to transfer to another map via their official server obelisk transfer system (Google "ark lost character transfer rollback").
17. And when your character is deleted by their bugs, there's no real support when you lose your character (click this link to read a recent example thread).
18. Official servers are a mess full of bad people and bad behavior and huge risks of losing all progress due to either your character being randomly deleted or because the server hits the Dino Limit and dies or because there's no more land to build on thanks to all the pillars everywhere.
19. And not to mention the insane time-sinks due to the slow 1x rates that are active most of the time, meaning that you spend 100s/1000s of hours working on a server that eventually will die due to all the griefing.
20. Not to mention the obnoxious, stressful official structure decay rates which mean that if you are in a real-life accident and spend 14 days in a hospital, your entire base will be deleted, which can be hundreds of hours of work just deleted with zero regard for your work...
21. So, due to the nature of the game and the time required, it's very unwise to play on the official servers, for so many reasons.

Unofficial servers:

1. Better server hardware, which means less lag.
2. No "box people [][][][][]" spamming the chat.
3. No pillars all over the entire map.
4. No constant lag-crashes/rollbacks.
5. Backups of your character and your base, so that your work is safe.
6. Slightly boosted rates which mean that you don't waste your life just taming a dinosaur.
7. Actual, fast and good support that ban all of the horrible asshole people.
8. Quality of life mods that make the game better by adding small new features and fixing bugs.
9. Or even total game conversions via big mods if people feel like that (I personally want more "vanilla" though).
10. And going to one of the biggest, well-funded servers means that you get reliable servers/hosts that have been running for years already.
11. Structure decays are often slightly enhanced and some servers even allow you to "pause" your decay if you need a longer absence and message the admins about it.
12. Unofficial servers are better in every way. Just avoid going to the ones ran by 14 year old "admins" on their own PC in their mom's bedrooms. Find the ones that own big clusters of multiple fast servers that have all ARK maps (to prove that they've got good finances) and have been running for years already. In most cases those top-quality servers necessarily have optional donations and sometimes small cash shops to fund their servers, but most of the ones with shops don't sell any P2W items in the shop, so simply check their shop to be sure you're okay with what they sell (it's usually things like cosmetic chibis, or basic construction materials). Those donations and shops are what helps fund the powerful server costs to stay open. And hey, if an unofficial server eventually shuts down after a few years, that's still more playtime and years of much more and better enjoyment than you would ever be able to get on official servers (which all die within a year due to the dino tame cap being hit by griefers as mentioned earlier, and which make your entire life there miserable due to all the griefers and toxic people).
13. You'll have a stress-free experience on unofficial servers. Bad people don't survive there. And best of all, you won't ruin your physical health while playing on slightly boosted-rate servers that respect your real life and playtime by letting you actually get things done while you play! And you won't constantly get enraged by the toxic morons that only exist on official servers.

A good way to find great unofficial servers is https://www.reddit.com/r/playarkservers/ !

Since buying the game and all DLC on Epic thanks to the big sale they had, I'm now patiently waiting for mod support so that I can leave the official servers behind. But until then I'll suffer the very painful official problems, hehe... ?

I made this thread to collect all known information about Epic's soon upcoming mod support, and will update if I hear anything new!

It's coming soon!

Enjoy!

[goldenboyv]

Thanks for your due diligence on this!

[Tsudico]

Mod support in Epic launcher is in beta according to the card:
https://trello.com/c/xqnzVcZz/27-mod-support-for-games

While Ark isn't included in this beta feature as of yet, it at least means it has moved one step closer to reality.

[chimpans]

MOD SUPPORT HAS BEEN RELEASED NOW!

Surprised that it came out so soon! Thought we would see this thread with slow updates for at least 1 more month... I was even planning to buy ARK on Steam just to get mods. Now I won't have to do that.

It's currently only for one game: MechWarrior 5. If you go to the store page for it, you can see a new Mods tab, which contains tons of mods. Soon we'll see the same for ARK! Since ARK promised to work with Epic to implement it as soon as it was possible in the store!

 

I took a screenshot of how mod pages look. This is in the latest official (non-beta) client v10.18.2:

[chimpans]

We are just waiting now for ARK's developers to join the new mod support at Epic Games. I hope it goes fast!

[chimpans]

I found out that Epic and ARK are collaborating to make ARK the first game that supports achievements on the Epic Store:

https://www.pcgamer.com/achievements-are-starting-to-appear-on-the-epic-games-store/

So chances are good that they will collaborate on mods very soon too. Possibly already working on implementing mods together. I would not be surprised if ARK mods are announced this month.

[goldenboyv]

Any update to this?

[chimpans]

Sadly the update is: Epic Store has mod support. ARK on Epic Store still doesn't.

I bought ARK on Steam because I got tired of waiting for this. It's also very likely that there are technical (game) issues with mod support on Epic. Because the current mod/server system relies on checking for mod IDs from the Steam Workshop, auto-downloading missing mods from the Steam Workshop based on the mod ID, and mods track players via their Steam IDs.

Mod authors would literally have to reprogram their mods to work on Epic. All authors would have to reprogram their mods for Epic and manually upload those mods to Epic after fixing them. Well, most mods that servers use are outdated, abandoned, with years like 2017/2018 being their last update, and they are simply used because they still work. The only person who can update a mod is the original author, because of the way mods are coded/compiled when released.

So every mod we want would have to be manually ported to Epic and then maintained on Epic by the authors. I do not think that Steam's ARK mod authors, many of whom have fully quit the game, would suddenly put in the work to port things to Epic and upload to Epic. Especially since a lot of Steam "kids" are anti-Epic.

And there's yet another issue with this game: All mods on the client and server must be updated to the exact same version, otherwise you see "Mod version mismatch" error and fail to login to the server. That's an issue on Steam. Now imagine Epic which has a whole separate mod upload/download schedule, and even mod authors that could suddenly stop/forget/say "screw epic" and stop uploading updates to Epic, all of which means that Epic players would very often be outdated compared to Steam and would be UNABLE TO LOGIN TO SERVERS FOR DAYS IN A ROW, or PERHAPS EVEN PERMANENTLY UNABLE (if the mod author stops releasing updates on Epic at all).

So even if all of these issues somehow got solved and you were playing on modded servers via Epic, you still risk losing your WHOLE CHARACTER and base/tribe FOREVER just in case EVEN JUST ONE mod author stops updating the Epic version of a mod that the server demands. In that situation, your only way to get back online would be to buy the Steam version and make a new character from level 1. Add this huge risk on top of all the other problems and you see the giant issues facing the Epic version of this game.

All of this means that I don't think Epic's version of ARK will --EVER-- get the ability to play on the same modded servers as Steam.

ARK on Epic may get mod support someday. But it won't be the same mods/ability to play on Steam servers.

Therefore I suggest people do what I did and grab the Steam version of ARK on sale. It's worth it. Peace of mind. All servers work.

I can say for 100% sure: The Epic version will NEVER be able to play on the same modded servers as Steam. Epic would be its own separate thing with separate mods and separate servers. And that's yet another reason why I moved to Steam. Because I want to be where the biggest, longest-living private servers communities exist!

[wizard03]

Interdasting! Any hope of xbox getting mod support too???

[legendofgow]

Yeah wildcard when mods will be on epic game store? please we need them  you have large community on epic games store now 

[MaSmyfication]

Any news on mod support for the Epic Games version of ARK?

At least let us know if plans have been officially abandoned (or postponed indefinitely).

[MJJ]

I cant combind S+ from Steam and Ark from EGS right? Is there any perspective for hope?

 

[Larkfields]

The EPIC version of Ark still cannot use mods 😞

[wizard03]

26 minutes ago, Larkfields said:

The EPIC version of Ark still cannot use mods 😞

not even a fart in a windstorm about consoles getting anything either....the tiny bit of hope for us was if epic got em first. =/

[Larkfields]

Just now, wizard03 said:

not even a fart in a windstorm about consoles getting anything either....the tiny bit of hope for us was if epic got em first. =/

WildCard should issue a statement so we know where they are at with mods for EPIC, PS and XBox.

I suspect Sony and MS are concerned about accepting mods on their consoles from community authors.  

[wizard03]

16 hours ago, Larkfields said:

WildCard should issue a statement so we know where they are at with mods for EPIC, PS and XBox.

I suspect Sony and MS are concerned about accepting mods on their consoles from community authors.  

Actually mod support on the xbox has been around for a lil bit. It was first introduced with fallout 4. The achievement system is turned off when an unofficial mod is in play, however there are also some official mods that will allow tracking and progress with the achievement system. But it has been some time since I last toyed with it.

Still, it was really neat. We could listen to different songs on the pipboy, had some unique armor and weapons added in. If I remember correctly there was even some quests with one of a kind power armors as the reward at the end of said quests....Of course god mode and whatnot as well.