ARK: Survival Evolved Release Date Delayed With More Updates & Fixes Planned

ARK: Survival Evolved has been delayed from Aug. 8 to Aug. 29, and additional updates will be coming to the game to make up for it. In a new blog post, Studio Wildcard detailed its rationale for the tough decision but assured fans the extra time will ultimately offer a better finished product. Despite ARK being certified gold for its retail release, the process getting there allegedly “took a little longer than expected.”

With this unfortunate admission in mind, the game’s content roadmap for the next handful of weeks has changed significantly. With regard to the officially modded Ragnarok map, that content has been delayed to Aug. 29 as well. However, during that time, the map’s developers will increase its overworld size by a full 25 percent. All custom Dino variants within the mod will also be able to transfer over to the man game using the CrossARK system.

Speaking of the main game, ARK will be getting even more of the PC-focused fixes we’ve seen throughout the month of July. All applicable changes will be ported to console too. Wildcard listed a few specific longstanding issues that will be getting maximum attention.

• Boss difficulty will be tweaked to make encounters challenging but more reasonable.
• Baby Dinos will no longer glitch and die during the aging process.
• Patches will be made to ensure hackers can’t glitch themselves under maps like TheCenter.
• Networking improvements will prevent DDoS attacks, server crashes and duping Dinos.
• PC-dedicated console server support is still coming.
• An option will make sure big-headed Dinos get out of the way when following players.

While no specific dates were offered for any of these fixes, we expect at least some of them to be pushed throughout the month of August to hopefully be live for the game’s new official release date.

For those who’ve been following ARK closely over the past few weeks, it’s no secret that Studio Wildcard has been working extra hard, and sometimes struggling, to bring Survival Evolved up to a fully polished state. Following several weeks of delays, the PS4 performance patch just went live to put Sony’s console support in lockstep with PC. During July, massive patches were deployed on PC to address as many small issues as possible. Compatibility and server hangups made those goals even harder to accomplish.

The question that remains, of course, is just how well Wildcard will be able to deliver on all these promises in a few weeks time. Certain issues on the above list, like server problems and DDoS attacks, have been quite literally bugging ARK players for years. If those chronic problems could’ve been solved so quickly, you’d think it would’ve been done already. Regardless of when these annoyances are actually addressed, we expect they will all be eventually.

ARK: Survival Evolved releases on Aug. 29 for PC, Xbox One, PS4, OS X and Linux.

What are your thoughts on ARK’s new release date? Can Wildcard truly deliver on all the above promises? Tell us in the comments section!