During Snail Games’ Investor Day, studio Wildcard co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz confirmed that ARK II is planned to launch sometime in 2028 after being delayed several times. “One of the things about doing ARK 2 was that we felt we had to learn a lot more about how to make the kind of game we wanted to do, and to do it kind of in phases,” said Stieglitz. “Learning about both the technology and the mechanics seemed, to us, safer than to just try to go and release a whole standalone product called ARK 2.“ He also claimed that the studio has an ambitious narrative planned, but how large scale it is depends on Vin Diesel’s involvement.
“We have a much more ambitious narrative built out for ARK 2,” he said. “But I’m going to be blunt, it’s really going to be highly dependent on just how involved Vin Diesel is actually going to be, which is still an open question.
“The question is: How much performance are we going to get from him?” Stieglitz continued. “Are we going to get one day, five days, eight hours? You don’t know. And the scope of how much performance we are going to get determines just how the narrative is going to play out. We have a narrative that’s if we get a lot of Vin Diesel, this is what we will do, and if we get a little Vin Diesel, this is what we will do.” The game will launch for Xbox Series X/S and PC via Steam and Microsoft Store. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass day one.
The game’s details:
Suddenly awakened on a strange primal world filled with dinosaurs and humans struggling for dominance; you must piece together the history of how you arrived there, team-up with legendary heroes, and confront powerful dark forces seeking to control the fate of all life. Saddle up, and join the definitive next-generation survival experience with ARK 2!
Every aspect of the ARK series has been rethought and redesigned in this sequel. Here’s a sampling of the new features that ARK 2 will contain upon its initial Early Access release:
Starring Vin Diesel (“Riddick”) as legendary ARK hero Santiago, experience an epoch-spanning adventure as he seeks to protect his daughter Meeka — voiced by Auli’i Cravalho (“Moana”) — from the ghosts of the ancient past and visions of a new future.
Fully stackable, user-created Mods for new creatures, items, gameplay features, and maps are now distributed across all platforms, along with support for modded unofficial servers!
Advanced character traversal mechanics like mantling, free-climbing, parkour, sliding, and swinging!
Target-lock, blocks, dodges, combos, staggers, special attacks, emphasizing player-skill-based action.
Explore a mysterious, chaotic world where native flora and fauna are being overrun by invasive primeval creatures from an extinct Earth!
Construct your weapons and tools from a range of distinct modules to customize their look and functionality — millions of possible combinations enable you to craft your own unique gear! The specific materials you choose will further affect the appearance of your items, with multiple options of resources found in unique regions of the world.
Natural and unnatural occurrences are always happening across the game world, independent of your presence! Your choices in deciding whether to interact with these events will yield rewards or challenges.
Hostile ‘Aratai’ hunt & attack you riding their own tamed creatures, as they seek to drive human interlopers from their world.
Instanced rendering and network-streaming enable much higher client and server performance for large, player-built structures, and a longer draw distance! Survivors can set up and save their own preferred building templates, share them, and place prospective template layouts in the world to then build them out as a team.
No omnipresent radar — animals now track and hunt by sight, sound, and smell! Hide from predators with visual camouflage and environmental obstructions, and learn to mask your scent! Dynamic pathfinding enables creatures to intelligently maneuver around obstacles and player-built structures.
Gain both experience points from gameplay, and knowledge points by accomplishing key objectives and overcoming unique challenges, to progress along a massive skill tree filled with new active abilities, perks, and passive benefits.
See foliage react convincingly to passing wildlife, water flow downstream around obstacles, volumetric stormclouds, localized weather systems, smoke and particles affected by physical forces, and much more! Fundamental advancement of lighting systems enables a more photorealistic day-night cycle, generating real-time ambient lighting & shadows within both natural and player-constructed environments!
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