Congratulations Survivors! You (and us too) survived a full day and night on the ARK! And what an eventful day it has been.
A lot’s been going on, and we thought it would be good to wrap up the day with a quick update regarding the state of the game and our plans over the days and weeks ahead.
Let’s discuss a few key topics: the first is no stranger to ARK games on Day One, and that’s client-side performance. Working from anecdotal feedback and hard data provided by players, we deployed a new client-side update released tonight that will improve your game's framerate. The update adds a number of optimizations and better settings assignments for each Graphics Quality mode, and you'll get an immediate gain upon trying out the new build.
Once you've got the update, please change your "Graphics Quality" setting to your preferred setting (Low/Medium/High/Epic) to take full advantage of the new under-the-hood settings. Tomorrow and into the weekend, we'll release further improvements to client performance, including generating a Pipeline State Object Cache to reduce/eliminate graphics stuttering & hitching and further optimizing the sky/cloud/atmosphere shaders. Thank you for bearing with us as the team works to ensure the game runs better for various configurations, including this first set of optimizations and the many still to come.
The second is a one-two combo: server-side stability and optimization. The team has been battling a number of never-before-seen crashes since the game went live (such is life — 1 hour of live play is equivalent to a month of internal QA). Honestly, the floodgates had opened, and at one point, servers were coming down faster than we could put them online! Thankfully, as of our latest server-side build, we’ve managed to get the servers in a much more stable state, eliminating over 95% of server crashes. There’s still more we plan to address, and you can expect more deployments to happen over the next few days to ensure as much uptime as possible and launch additional servers based on capacity needs!
As for how well the servers run, we’ve been collecting data over the last 24 hours to identify major server performance pain points. This will be a major focus for the engineering team, and we’ll be looking to introduce as many optimizations as possible. After a week or so, we plan to have a PTR branch of the game available to test out some of our riskier optimizations before we set them live to the public. But for now, we’ll continue operating from the main branch of the game as we’ve just launched and are in rapid patch mode!
And lastly, the ARK Devkit (for ASA) is now available! For those unfamiliar, the ARK DevKit is a custom version of the Unreal Engine 5 Editor that provides dedicated infrastructure to help you take your imagination into the game of ARK: Survival Ascended. The kit is available to download HERE, and we’ve got a quick FAQ you can check out HERE.
We’re really excited to get this out to you and cannot wait to see you build beyond boundaries in ARK: Survival Ascended!
This is only the beginning of ASA’s Early Access journey; there’s still much more we plan to do to the game as we develop it. This means working through the rough patches and introducing new features, content, and gameplay. We cannot wait to get all that and more in your hands. But for now, we’ll say thank you for all your feedback, support, and excitement. It’s been wonderful watching so many of you begin the first steps of your ASA adventures, and we can’t wait to see where it takes us!
Good night! ❤️