Lewiatan

This. It was really discourging to see the dev team had to be pushed by community hard to address the problems player had with the game. The constructive and frequent communication is the key to healthy Early Access; I hope the communication won't disappear after few months into that period like in ARK 1 did for a while.

I read the list of the planned features and the flashbacks of ARK 1 Early Access came to my mind. I wonder if the managment of the studio and technical leaders learned their lessons from ARK EA and will focus on core gameplay loops, techincal aspect of the game and stability, and avoid the feature creep. I have little faith even 50% of listed features will be implemented in the game, unfortunately. If you cut advanced dino AI from ARK 2 (the lack of was the biggest disadvantage of the first game) I'd be really upset because I want to interact with dinosaurs, not cars with dino skins. That realisation killed my excitment to play ARK 1. Also, I beg you, focus on optimisation of the game for real so there were GPUs on the planet that could run a game in stable 60FPS epic settings during Early Access. If you gave me the game with all features listed and it'd work well, I'd be impressed and I may give the studio a shot again. Good luck!

The last thing this game needs is another feature creep. The initial Early Access feature creep ruined the technical quality of the game to the point ARK will never be fixed without rewritting entire game's code. If you plan to add new features, for sake of the game don't add such redundant things like a toilet or a camera or another useless creature. Granted, it's good to see WC has bagun regular communication after so long. We will see how long it will last.

Too bad your communication is not even half as good as communication between your sister company and Atlas playerbase at this moment. It feels like you were asked to help Grapeshot fixing their mess instead off working on ARK. Fine, you announced beta branch of S+ and kibble rework and after that what? Will you start bug fixing this game finally? Will you update this game to the newest version of UE4 that fixes tons of issues? We won't get answears to these question at all probably.

Unless you showed clear and consistent Roadmap (that almost every Early Access and AAA game does nowadays) how you are going to tackle ancient bugs and atrocious quality of the game and Extinction, I would not believe in anything you say in the post Chris. Because we do know you let your player base down the countless amount of times in the past. For once, don't fall into the temptation of feature creep.

Atlas won't affect ARK development? Please, don't mislead your customers. The atrocious quality of Exctinction and almost no new meaningful content for past a few months tell it has already affected ARK. You even admit some people from WC works for Atlas, so how does it not affect ARK? Atlas will have the same problems as ARK. Poor optimisation, feature creep, terrible communication between developers and playerbase and flawed core gameplay design. I guarantee Atles will be bloated with redundant features without polishing and then WC 2.0 will move on to add another shiny toy like they had been doing through ARK life cycle... Apprently, they want to found game development with cosmetic MTX... I wonder how exploititive that will be. Bethesda style? 18$ for a armour skin? In PCGamer article you claimed you don't want to make the same mistake which was ignoring your community. There is no faith in you that you can improve to be blunt. Btw. This time make sure your boss didn't break another deal with previous employer(s) ...

If the only purpouse of certain dinosaur exsitance in your tribe is sitting and laying eggs forver, it is already useless dinosaur. The game needs this kibble overhaul to reduce stress on servers and clients caused by breeding farms with hundreds of dinosaurs. Plus, with this change Wildcard can finally see clearly what dinosaurs serve no purpouse in the game and improve it eventually.

I couldn't have agreed more with you. I'm looking forward to watching your video discussing this dev post. I feel sorry for QA testing team. They can do their best but in the end higher in ranks decide what is getting a fix and when the patch/update is released. The studio may deliberately release a patch with a game-breaking bug and counting on getting away with it.

Dear Chris. I have one major problem in your way to justify the atrociously bad quality of the game and Extinction. This is 60$ fully released game and players should not be your beta or Q&A testers nor should you expect players to become ones. The way you described the problem tells me you want to excuse broken game by few numbers of QA testers. This is unacceptable frankly. Your customers do not care you don't have enough manpower to be blunt. They care about the quality of the product they paid for. What you had been doing during entire Early Acces was bloating the game up with half-cooked or in some cases redundant content/mechanics. Instead of taking that time to flesh out core gameplay mechanics, do QoL updates, you were adding more and more stuff without polishing it before moving to a new shiny toy. Your game fell into the trap of feature creep that is coming back to you with full force. It seems your team is literally afraid of touching old code, because the whole game may fall apart. The sad part is people had been giving you tons of feedback, but you chose to ignore it deliberately or due to simple incompetence. Early Access has ended over a year ago. You earned a lot of money and you can afford more paid QA testers, but you would have to want that to begin with. You would have to have a better quality standard for game development, to begin with. The only reason why we got more regular bug fixes updates and QoL ones was due to BadArt4BadARK. The action was simply too large to ignore. It seems WC hasn't learned anything from EA, to be honest, and ARK would continue to be considered as a game with a great potential wasted by game-breaking bugs and incompetent studio. It's a shame how this game has ended up. I used to love this game, but bugs, lack of any optimization and developers refusing to communicate with the player base during EA was enough. PS: Unfortunate, we players cannot get a simple "sorry" with highlighted steps to improve the bad quality of the game.

I read comments about graphical quality of Switch port. So you say, Wildcard used false advertisment to promote Switch port using prettier screenshots from other game's versions? If that's the case, it was illegal to promote the game that way. Bait-And-Switch to be precise.

Taking in consideration issues such as bugs and gameplay design flaws, I can tell without a doubt this DLC was not tested long enough and WC just released buggy content hoping we, player, will let that slide... I'd like to remind WC this is not Early Access for over a year. Nothing much improved in quality of product or aproach to the game development post launch. WC, you could have invested money in paid QA testers at least.

I see ARK Additions may have used a raptor model that anyone can buy on Truong CD Artist website (the modder's own work here could be new feathers, but the base mesh may not be his work) . If it is that model, I wonder if the modder purchased correct license that allows him getting financial profits by using that model in his project (personal use /non-commericial license costs 11$, but the commercial one costs a few times more).

I'm afraid this short-term band aid solution will blow up in Wildcard's face. In the same way like graples did with undermeshing on Abberation. Players are so creative to exploit this buggy game that's hard to imagine how crypods will be exploited. Unfortunately, I just lost faith in this company long time ago.

According to what we know this will be one-time server cap reduction and then servers will reach tame cap again. It does not fix nor address the source of the problem I mentioned earlier at all.

Wildcard was really vague about kibble tree rework after Exctinction premiere and their tonne reminds me of a student who says he will write notes during a lecture, but in the end he won't do that at all. Plus, as another person mentioned they are as eager to implement that QoL patch as they're eager to implement S+. After a whole YEAR since the announcement they have still no clue what features they want to take from the mod and put it in vanilla game... They have no ambition nor will to improve core game. If they have one, their actions contradict that.