Pipinghot

I guarantee it will still happen, and WildCard will still need to focus on it. Meshing will be improved by UE5, but it will not magically be fixed.

The short answer is "No". They're not going to fix anything until after ASA is published, and maybe not even then. The only thing they're definitely doing at this minute is porting ARK from UE4 to UE5, that is what they have signed a contract with Nitrado to do. Anything else, and I mean anything else, even the features and improvements they have talked about on the forums might or might not happen. Even if WC said, "Cross my heart and hope to die..." it would mean nothing, because they have a contract to do something specific and that's the only thing you can be sure they're going to do. The only improvements that you can safely assume will happen are improvements that are automatically included when you port a game from UE4 to UE5, and that's not very many. Even most of the improvements that are possible with UE5 won't happen until later, if at all. WC is not trying to fix anything right now, they are desperately trying to meet a deadline that they have signed a contract for, anything else that you can possibly think of is either a "maybe", a "maybe later" or a "not going to happen." Any bugs that you can think of that have been waiting for a long time to be fixed, are not going to be fixed. WC is not working on bug fixes, they are simply trying to reach the point where they can sell the "new" game to people. What will happen in the future? Well that's anyone's guess, but one thing you can be certain of is that WC will be the same company they've always been, the leadership will be the same and the culture will be the same. Are they going to put more focus on fixing bugs once they publish ASA? No, it's still going to be the same company, they're not going to change the way they do business.

As you can see from the discussion everyone is guessing, which is exactly what WC is doing, guessing. If ASA continues to make enough money (with more DLC's) then they'll continue supporting it. If income drops because there are not enough players buying new DLC's then they'll stop supporting it. Even if WildCard has published a schedule for how long they plan to support ASA, they would just be guessing, just like they've done with every other game. And, of course, this entire discussion depends on the assumption that they'll sell enough copies of ASA to pay back or refinance all of their current debts (and they owe a lot of money). In the end, you'll have to decide for yourself whether you think WC will stay in business, and whether you think ASA will make enough money to keep being supported in the future.

The official info is in the Community Crunches. WildCard has doesn't post in threads.

They tried adding a prehistoric Volkswagen to the game, it didn't go well.

No, no one has any idea about this, including WildCard/Snail. They're going to to support ASA for as long as is makes the amount of money they need it to make, and then they'll stop supporting it when the income drops off too much or they finally create some other game that makes lots of money. So far every game they've tried other than ARK has failed, so if you want to know the future of ASA the best thing you can do is buy a really good crystal ball.

If you want to make PvE more dangerous for yourself because you think the game isn't dangerous, there are plenty of ways to do it. * Don't ever trade with other players/tribes. You're only allowed to have things if you can farm it, tame it or get it yourself. * Choose to avoid taming flyers no matter what map you're on. If you have to do everything in ARK overland, the game is more challenging. * Choose to avoid taming harvesting animals like doeds, anky's etc. * Choose to refuse to learn certain advanced engrams that make you more powerful and make the game easier. No rifles, shotguns, no mining drills, etc. When you have to fight everything in the game with a pike, crossbow and longneck rifle I can assure you the E will become more dangerous. * Choose to avoid using blueprints. Play the entire game with equipment from the engrams that you learn. Even if you loot drops and take items from the drops, don't ever repair them. Let's say you find an advanced longneck rifle. Allow yourself to use it until it breaks, then throw it away. * Don't ever make fences, walls or gates for your base. If all of your dinos are constantly outside and potentially vulnerable, I guaranteed your base will get attacked by wandering dinos more often. * Also, don't use cryopods. If you force yourself to keep all of your dinos out side, unprotected by gates and walls, then you will always have to be aware of the environmental threats to your herd. There are plenty more ideas, of course, but you get the idea. It's really easy for you to make PvE more dangerous for yourself if that's what you want.

Two words: Conan Exiles. I'm sure there are other games that do this too, but if ARK makes changes to make it play just like Conan Exiles then that dilutes the individual character of each game. If you want your base to be attacked in PvE there's a game that does this, if you don't want your base to be attacked in PvP there's different game that does it that way. Also, this just punishes smaller tribes who want to build bigger, more interesting bases. A tribe of 12 can defend their base much more easily than a tribe of 3. If the tribe of 3 people wants to build a bigger base because it's more interesting, or more fun, or just looks better at the location where they're building, why should they be punished by being forced to spend a bigger portion of their time farming materials to keep their turrets filled? Lots of people build for the fun of building, they shouldn't be punished for enjoying on of the main features of the game. People would just build a larger number of small bases that work together in a complex. Instead of one or two big buildings they'd have 8-12 smaller buildings as a way to get around the game mechanics (which is what some tribes actually do in Conan Exiles). It's not that difficult to separate a single base into several smaller mini-bases with each mini-base having a specialized function. In the end, it doesn't help server performance at all, the only thing it does is force bigger tribes to re-arrange how they build their buildings. This is just my opinion,but you're solving a "problem" that isn't really a problem, and you're doing it by creating a new problem that actually is a real problem. The main problem with ARK is the incredible amount of time that you have to sink into tedious chores and busy work. There are so many tasks that have to be done over and over and over again that don't benefit the enjoyment of game play in any way, and this suggestion would only make things worse. In PvP people understand that they have to constantly farm materials for turrets because they're competing with other players, if you want to stay ahead of other people you have to work smarter and work harder. But in PvE this would just create a new grind that no one really enjoys, and on top of that people would lose tames that they've spend a lot of time taming & breeding, and they'd have to do all of that work again just to catch up to where they started. Adding more time sinks to the game is not really an improvement. Adding a new "constant effort" doesn't make the game more dangerous, it just makes it more tedious. You might want to consider making this a completely separate thread, or put it the suggestions forum. WildCard made mutations a massive time sink on purpose, but maybe you can find a way to make that time sink more fun or interesting.

As you have discovered, the usefulness of moschops is very situational. It depends on which map you're on, the server settings, what tames you already have, what engrams you've learned. It is a really cool concept of a dino, but it's greatest usefulness is when you're playing with limited access to critical resources. My guess is that when ASA is new the moschops will be pretty useful (more useful than most people realize) but it will quickly become overshadowed as people get higher level tames for flying, harvesting, etc.

It doesn't sound like that at all, not if you pay attention to the context. He was replying to the post asking, "And by the way PLEASE show me where these gaming industry professional are all saying ark is a easy port from UE4 to UE5." In reply to that comment, Cervantes showed videos by a single guy doing it by himself, a guy who doesn't have a whole development team, demonstrating that it's pretty darned easy. Context is king.

I never said that he did, you're making up fake arguments to argue against. What I actually did say is that he said it would be free. You'll notice that "free" and "easy" are not the same thing. Apparently you're confused about the difference between "angry" and "debunking claims". In an honest and mature discussion people understand that anger and debate are not the same thing. And again, you demonstrate that you don't understand where the real work takes place during this kind of port. There is very little relationship between the type of the graphical images and the difficulty of doing the migration. The graphics are not where the complexity of a migration comes from. Wow, you're really having a problem with understanding. I never said that industry professionals are saying ARK is easy, you got this wrong too. What I said that the games industry at large has been saying that porting from UE4 to UE5 is not that hard a process, which is exactly why so many of them are doing it for free. All of those other game companies are also in business to make money, if it was as difficult as you think it is then the industry wouldn't be so consistent in doing it for free. WildCard and Snail are telling a different story than the rest of the industry, they are pretending that ARK is uniquely difficult to migrate, which is a disingenuous argument. And people like you, who don't understand what makes a migration difficult or not, are falling for their dishonest PR campaign. Nope, still not angry. Repeating your bad "argument" doesn't make it better. There's a connection here that you either don't understand or are trying to deliberately ignore. The reason it was such a bad decision is explicitly because it's dishonest, and because that dishonesty is so transparent and obvious to anyone who doesn't cover their eyes. The issue is not that they changed their mind about doing the port for free, people would have understood that if the price was reasonable. The issue is that they tried to rip players off and change $60+ when it doesn't even remotely merit that price. If you like being ripped of by dishonest game companies then go right ahead, spend your money how you want. But don't expect other people to go along with it. While it's understandable that people want to blame Snail, they are pretty terrible after all, that doesn't mean that WC are innocent. The whole reason they're in bed with Snail is that the company was started under dishonest circumstances, leading to them agreeing to a massive settlement which forced them to look for outside funding. It's worth remembering that WC sold the Scorched Earth DLC for money while ARK was still in Early Access, which was a sleazy move. Having a paid DLC while still in EA is about as sleazy as it gets, and it was a decision WC made based on WC's sleazy ethics while founding the company. Snail isn't the root cause of the problem, they are a symptom of the rot that was there to begin with. Snail is terrible, but their terribleness doesn't mean anyone should let WC off the hook for creating this problem in the first place.

A general note on building taming traps - it's better to build on pillars & ceiling tiles than using foundations, because foundations have a bigger impact on animal spawns. Also, just a personal opinion on taming traps, I prefer to build them generic rather than for a specific species. A 2x2 with walls 2 tiles high and ramps leading up from opposite directions will let you trap a wide variety of stuff rather than trying to craft traps for specific species.

Do you realize you just supported my argument? Specifically, "constant massive lag spikes and crashing mostly due to the large amount of tames out on the map". Before tame caps (and long before cryopods) this was so much worse. The reason they introduced tame caps in the first place was because of the "constant massive lag spikes and crashing mostly due to the large amount of tames out on the map". Those lag spikes and crashing continued to occur after tame caps, but to a significantly lesser degree, because tame caps significantly reduced the loads on the server. However, with the introduction of cryopods those lag spikes and crashing did not see another significant reduction, because players continued to have large numbers of tames out on the map. By your own description, Gen 2 and Fjordur servers continued to have "constant massive lag spikes and crashing" in spite of the existence of cryopods. Cryopods did not help the performance of those servers because un-podded tames are what really matter. In theory, if all of the players on a server agreed to keep almost all of their tames in cryopods so that they never approach the tame cap, that could improve server performance, but in reality that doesn't happen. What really happens in practice is that players keep tames unpodded until the tame cap is reached and only pod up the extra tames. Agreed. And cryopods won't help with that at all. Servers will be busy, players will be taming and breeding like crazy, constantly pushing the edge of the tame caps. They'll be cryopodding hundreds and hundreds of tames, and yet the tame caps will still be pushed to the limit, which will cause the corresponding lag spikes and server crashes. Tame caps already help as much as they can, unless WC decides to lower them even further. But whether they're lowered or not, new servers will be tame capped in spite of the massive use of cryopods, it's the unpodded tames (and breeding) that will be affecting server performance. Which has nothing to do with server performance unless the server is poorly designed. I agree that lots of people will have individual performance issues as they try to continue using their older computers, but this has nothing to do with the performance of the servers themselves. If I've overlooked your reasons for bringing this up please feel free to explain more, but right now this looks like and unrelated point. Well yes, busy servers are busy servers, no matter what. But that's a separate discussion from whether tame caps or cryopods are the thing that improves server performance.

Your argument demonstrates a lack of understanding of how game engine migrations work. The difficulty of migrating from UE4 to UE5 is not based on the graphics, cartoon or otherwise, the difficulty is based on the underlying code that runs the game mechanics. The physics engine, pooping, egg laying, ballistics, weapons damage, harvesting, taming, breeding, building (in both ARK and Fortnite)... and so on, these are the elements of a game that dictate the difficulty of the migration. Upgrading graphics is not a required part of the migration, it's an add-on project that takes place subsequent to the migration. You can't take advantage of UE5 graphical features until after you port the game from UE4 to UE5. Anyone who claims that migrating from UE4 to UE5 requires changes to the graphics doesn't understand UE nor do they understand the migration project (or they're trying to dishonestly fool players with exaggerated claims, like WC has been doing). When Jeremy Stieglitz first announced that they were migrating ARK from UE4 to UE5 for free, this is exactly what he meant - migrating the underlying game engine with additional changes (like graphics) to come at a later date. Migrating from UE4 to UE5 for free is the industry standard, across games with a wide variety of graphics and back-end systems. For WC & Snail to pretend that it's so much more difficult for ARK than for other games is dishonest, it's nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to squeeze money out of people. Swing and a miss. Years of IT experience, including plenty of experience with application migrations. Just because you are underinformed doesn't mean other people are. Fortunately for this discussion neither your experience nor my experience is the issue, we don't need to waste time slapping our resumes on the table to see who's is bigger. The experience that matters is WildCard's, and in this case specifically Jeremy Stieglitz' experience. He's one of the founders of WildCard Studios, he's been intimately involved in the game from the very beginning and it should be incredibly obvious he has tons and tons of experience that is relevant to this discussion. If anyone has a good idea of how easy or difficult it would be to migrate ARK from UE4 to UE5 he would be near the top of the list, and he's the guy who announced to the world that it would be free. This happened before the campaign of dishonesty was started by WildCard and Snail, it should be obvious to anyone that he exposed the truth before the lies and desperate cash grab became the main story. Don't want to believe me? That's fine, it's the internet and you don't know me. But if credentials and a deep understanding of ARK are what you're looking for then Jeremy has them, and he's the one who said they could do it for free. So you believe that the corporate entities "have made a blaring mistake" at best, or have a history of "destroying every IP" at worst, but then you argue that we should trust them and believe them when they claim it's more difficult than the rest of the games industry says it is. That's an interesting contradiction within your own arguments. Again, just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that other people share your lack of understanding.

Strongly disagree with that claim, if a server is tame capped then cryopods are meaningless for server performance, and most official servers are tame capped (or close to it) most of the time. It's the tame cap that affects server performance, not cryopods, they introduced tame caps long before cryopods. The only time cryopods improve server performance is if the server is significantly below the tame cap because the players on the server are using cryopods instead of having dino's unboxed, which almost never happens on Official servers, or even on busy unofficial servers. It's something that happens almost entirely on low population unofficial servers.

It's only "excessive" if your goal is to give WC a free pass on their dishonesty. True or false, real or not real, honest or dishonest, truth or lies, these things can only be discussed if you're willing to scrutinize the details. If one's goal is to hide the truth behind a smoke screen then they can just wave their hands and complain that it's excessive, but one wishes to have an honest discussion then the details matter. How many exaggerations and falsehoods does WC need to publish before you decide to scrutinize the things they're saying? If you don't care about the truth, if it doesn't bother you that WC is being deliberately dishonest, that's certainly your choice. If you want to give them money for something that's absolutely not a "new game" that's also your choice. But don't be surprised when other people complain and explain about WC's dishonesty. Some people's opinions and speculations are based on reasoning and scrutinizing the honesty of WC's claims, while other opinions and speculations are based on wishful thinking and ignoring the reality of WC's past behaviors. If you just want to believe everything they say in spite of their well documented history, that's your choice, but that choice is based entirely on speculation and believing everything WC says. And that choice still doesn't change the fact that multiple items on that list were just different ways of saying "port ASE to UE5". That's not just an opinion, it's an honest comparison between WC's list and the features of UE5. So you admit that the list published by WC is meaningless until true gameplay is revealed. In that case why did you make the claim that, "That goes well beyond just being a simple reskin or remaster tbh." You didn't have any problem expressing your opinion and speculating that WC is going to deliver on that list, but when someone provides a series of specific arguments that the list is bloated and/or potentially not going to really happen suddenly you describe the response as speculation. If you're being honest, we're all speculating. But some speculation is grounded in reality and WC's history, while other speculation is based on uncritically accepting WC's list that's made up of marketing material padded with features that are built into UE5. Agreed, that's true. Which is all the more reason to take anything they say with a grain of salt. WC is desperate to make money to stay in business, which is not a situation that should lead you to believe everything they say. When people are desperate to make money, that's exactly when you should scrutinize their claims in detail. As you say, "They have no choice to stay afloat", which means the last thing you should do is trust them. Which is precisely what they're not going to do. As previously noted, WC's entire strategy over the last few month has been a big game of smoke and mirrors. Obfuscation, exaggerated claims, trying to take credit for UE5 features, being unclear in their communications and/or ignoring players' requests for more transparency - these are all deliberate features of their current campaign of (mis)communication and marketing. They're not going to give you clarity, because clarity is exactly what they're trying to avoid. That is soooo not true. Plenty of games have ported to UE5 (or are in the process of porting to UE5) for free. It's simply not as hard as WC wants people to believe. It cannot, by definition, be a "1-2 year+" effort because they are contractually obligated to publish in a couple of months or face some pretty stiff financial penalties. ASA didn't even exist as a concept until somewhere in the Jan-Mar time frame. As a reminder, in January there was the announcement on Twitter that porting ARK to UE5 would be free. That was it, the whole thing, port ARK to UE5 for free. Nothing about ASA, nothing about enhancements, nothing about new DLC's, nothing about new dinos for all the maps, just port to UE5. And then in March they reneged on that promise, completely changed course and suddenly announced ASA. This is not something they had been working on, planning or even thinking about. Someone at WC/Snail realized they were in financial trouble and had a sudden inspiration that they would try to scam their player base out of money with a "new game" that would be functionally identical to the existing game. That's exactly why they are padding their list of "accomplishments", pretending that things take a lot more work than they really do and taking credit for features that are built in to UE5. ASA could easily have been accomplished as a DLC but they want to convince people that it's a new game. If you fall for that scam then it's your responsibility. You can spend your money however you want, but that doesn't mean WC is honest or to be trusted. Again, plenty of games have ported, or are in the process of porting, to UE5 for free. That's the whole point of using UE5 (or Unity, or any other game engine). The game engine does most of the work for you and then you make changes to take advantage of the new features. The reasons that developers use game engines is because it's much, much easier to migrate to a new version of the engine than it would be if they designed and built their own game engine. Unreal has already done most of the hard work, WC has the easy part, that's why developers pay a fee to UE in the first place.

The problem is that you're listening to WC's marketing and not looking carefully enough at the things they're saying. Again, it would be really useful to you if you go look for some videos and articles that debunk what WC's saying. What you've posted is the wishlist, everything WC would like to do (or at least what they want players to believe they want to do) when ASA goes live. But most of the items on this list are just multiple ways of saying "ported to UE5" or they're hopeful-thinking items what won't be included when ASA first gets published. That's two different ways of saying the same thing. "Unreal Engine 5" and "Lumen" are both "porting to UE5". Once they say, "porting to UE5 there's no reason to list Lumen, it's already built in to UE5. WC didn't create Lumen, WC didn't make Lumen happen, it's already there just waiting for them. That's exactly the sort of list padding or exaggerating of claims that people should look out for. Nvidisa DLSS has been available for two years, they could have added support for it a any time. It's not part of ASA, it's not created by or caused by ASA, it's just something they're throwing on there to make the list look bigger and try to convince people that this is extra work that's part of ASA when it's really not. RTXDI and DLSS are both features for the RTX series of video cards. It's nice they're adding support for these features if you own an RTX card, but again adding support for these features doesn't make them "part of" ASA, they're padding the list with something they could have done any time, with any DLC. That's a meaningless marketing phrase that doesn't tell us anything about the actual work being done. Every single bug fix, every single patch, every DLC they've done some work on "cleaning up the code base", that's simply part of supporting game, there's nothing special about it. Beware of empty, buzzword marketing phrases that don't tell you anything useful. The 3rd item on the list that's part of porting to UE5. More list padding. The 4th item on the list that's part of porting to UE5. More list padding. Both of which have strong arguments that they'll be bad for the game. 1) Bad for console players (in PvP), and unimportant for PvE. It's nice if you happen to have a friend on a different platform, but you can find many examples (in many games) of PvP players complaining that cross-platform play makes the game worse for them. If it benefits you personally that's great, but it's not universally beneficial. There are plenty of games that don't include cross-platform support because not all platforms are equally good at playing the game. 2) Bad for Steam players, bad for anyone who doesn't like premium mods, and not as good for creators as it should be. (I won't say it's "bad" for creators, but they're not getting a great deal compared to other platforms). WC is pretending that it's for the benefit of the creators but they're paying the creators less than other platforms pay creators. Most platforms pay the creators 70% and keep 30%. WildCard is going to pay creators less (if I recall it's 50%) and keeping the rest. If they were really doing it to benefit the mod creators (and make no mistake about it, mods have contributed significantly to ARK's financial success, they would make sure the creators get most of the money from premium mods. 3) Overwolf - bad for everyone. The cross-platform modding also means that WC is going to make Overwolf mandatory, which is bad because OW is (and has always been) a resource hog with a long history of making players unhappy in many games. OW loves to talk about the features they add for players but on their best day it's bloatware that uses up more computer resources than it should. Maybe, but probably not yet, this is most likely list padding. Considering they've cancelled their efforts for most of the reskinning they were doing until after ASA goes live (which is to say, even most of the reskinning won't be in the game when ASA goes live) there's no reason to believe this will be included in ASA when you pay for it. They may be promising it for the future, but if you buy ASA you're buying future promises, there's no reason to believe this will actually be in the game when it goes live. We can already walk and sprint in different directions so what is this other than an empty phrase to pad the list? And even if this is an enhancement, it's so not-a-big-deal that including it in a list of "ASA features" is laughable, no one should be impressed by this "feature". So... a new version of something that's already in the game. Pointless. More list padding. The 5th item on the list that's part of porting to UE5. More list padding. These are nice, that's true. Assuming they're actually included in the game when ASA goes live. Keep in mind people have been asking for these improvements since the very beginning on Early Access for ASE, these improvements have existed in mods for many years now, and WC is only now, finally, getting around to making these improvements. And, of course, we don't know if they'll actually be included with ASA when it launches because they're desperately trying to meet an expensive deadline. But hey, if they do manage to include this in ASA then that's good, glad to see they've finally done it. So far this is the only item on the list that's truly an improvement that benefits everyone. But does that make ASA a "new game"? No, it doesn't. It's nice to see them finally adding basic features to the mini-map. Again, asked for since the beginning of Early Access for ASE. So yeah, glad they're finally getting around to it. Who knows, maybe they'll finally get around to making map pins scale properly with the map when you zoom. But since they didn't list map pins we can only hope. And, as before, is this really a feature of a "new game" or is it simply an improvement to their original, crappy mini-map that could have been done at any time in the last 7 years. Which they've never described in detail. Again, meaningless marketing phrases that pad the list and don't tell us anything useful. We already have wild babies, have had them for a long time, and they made the game worse. Every baby kairuku is a waste of space in the game because they're untameable, reducing the number of tameable, useful kairuku. Obviously you can still kill them in the wild, but you can do that with adults so being babies doesn't improve the game in any way. Now, if babies are going to become tameable (which is not something WC has said) then this could be an improvement, but if they're not tameable they'll make the game worse just like baby kairuku did. Just like they add new structures with every DLC, there's nothing special about new structures, nothing that requires publishing a "new game". This is just a basic run-of-the-mill enhancement just like every DLC has had. If they were charging for ASA at the same price as the DLC's then this would be fine, but they're pretending that ASA will be a "new game" and trying to charge people for a new game when it's really not. Even if you want to argue that some of the items on this list are better than I've argued, this still isn't a new game. It's really just ad DLC-enhancement to ARK and should be charged for like a DLC. Minor enhancements - assuming they get added in time. More of the "code enhancements" that are part of maintaining a game over time. Fixing poorly designed game balance doesn't make it a "new game", they're the type of improvements that should have been happening all along. Look at how terrible the mission system is in Genesis, and they never bothered to fix them or even tweak them. If they decided to fix the many problems with Genesis missions would that be a "new game" or would it just be fixing things they screwed up the first time? Which will be a separate DLC, which will be paid for separately and which could have been published for ASE without making a "new game" first. There's nothing about a new canonical story expansion that required WC to "create" ASA. No, it really doesn't, and that's the point. I'm not saying that WC is doing zero work, and I'm not saying that their work should be done for free. What I'm saying is that no matter how far you try to stretch your imagination this is not a new game and no one should be fooled into paying new game prices. They could easily have published ASA as a $10-$15 DLC but instead they're trying to convince players that it's a new game and attempting a cash grab because they've been financially mismanaging their company. If WC had been honest to begin with, if they had said, "We're going to charge $15 to port ARK to UE5 and we're going to include some minor enhancements in that price" then everything would have been great. Even though they originally said that the port to UE5 was going to be free, most people would have understood if they said that was a mistake and they were going to need to charge for the change. They could have charged the price of a DLC to port the game to UE5 and the vast majority of players would have been fine with it. But instead they've engaged in an organized campaign of disinformation, list padding, marketing lies and just general dishonesty with their players. ASA is a naked cash grab, it's not what WC has been saying it's going to be. The game that players get when ASA goes live will be 95% the exact same game they're already playing.

Considering neither game has been proven to exist yet, nothing differentiates them. Then again, WC didn't sign a contract worth over $4M committing to publish ARK2, so I guess that's a difference. ASA will get published no matter how much of a pile of garbage it is. But no one can say for sure that ARK2 will ever exist, so that's the main difference. They're not. no one should enable their marketing lies by supporting the idea that ASA is truly 'developing a game'. They're reskinning their existing game in a desperate cash grab, hoping that enough people will be suckers and give them money a second time to keep playing the same game. If you believe WildCard's previous announcements, ARK2 will have significantly different gameplay from ASE/ASA. Setting aside about WC for a minute, it's pretty clear that their original intentions for ARK2 were to truly be a different game from ASE/ASA. ARK2 wasn't supposed to look like DLC for ASE/ASA, it was supposed to be a sequel in the true sense. Whether ARK2 will ever be published, and what it will eventually look like if it does get published, is anyone's guess. There's no reason to be confused, there are plenty of youtubers and articles in the game press describing exactly what's happening with ASA, you can watch or read them if you want to understand things in more detail. The short description is, "ASA is really still just ASE, but ported to UE5, with a couple of minor changes that aren't important". ASA is not a new game, it's not a sequel, it's not the preparation for ARK2 being released, it's nothing more than a naked cash grab to keep WC alive because their owners/managers have been mismanaging the company. It's not, ASA is nothing like what ARK2 is supposed to be. It's really just porting ASE to UE5 and reskinning some graphical assets. There is the possibility that WC will make more improvements in the future, there's the possibility that they will release more DLC's for ASE, but if you buy ASA at the time they put it in Early Access it will be nothing more than ASE with a different name. ASA will be 95% the exact same game as ASE. When (if) ARK2 gets released it will be significantly different from ASE/ASA. It does. They're pretending ASA is a new game in a desperate cash grab to keep the company alive. I'm not going to list names here on the forums, but there are plenty of youtubers who have been covering this for months, including a number of well established ARK content creators. Go check them out and you'll get the answers you're looking for. WildCard is never going to give you clarity, because lack-of-clarity is part of their plan.

I think you quoted the wrong post from me there Even so, I appreciate you answering LadyVicious' question, that's interesting to know.

Paragraphs are your friend.

Unless it was a mod, there is no golden dodo in the game. You may have found a dodo with an odd color that looked golden, but there's no such thing as a golden dodo in ARK. Are you perhaps thinking of the hesperornis?

It won't be better, that's wishful thinking. WildCard is desperately rushing to publish ASA before the deadline based on their contract with Nitrado. You can bet that no matter how bad it is they're going to release it before then and let the players suffer for their mismanagement of the product.

I don't know about the worst tame, but the worst creature in ARK is the CEO of Snail Games.

Well they've signed a contract with Nitrado that says WildCard will have to start paying extra money to Nitrado if WildCard misses the deadline. So my best is that they'll publish on the deadline, no matter how crappy the game is at that point. This is the same WildCard they've always been, there's always time to fix their plagued-by-bugs game later.

As far as I know it will still apply. Even if you run your own unofficial or private cluster, all of the servers in that cluster have to be the same type.