It’s a milestone year for the Ark, and Studio Wildcard guarantees it’s memorable. We’ve already seen it to celebrate the franchise’s 10th birthday The Ark Survival has risen Add a remastered Ragnarok DLC to a series of expansion suites and receive an engine upgrade. The evolution of the original game Ark Survival has also earned an unexpected new expansion, Aquatica. However, the icing on the birthday cake will be lost, the colony, the first all-new expansion of the ASA, which is scheduled to drop in December. In an exclusive interview with , Studio WildCard co-founders Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz will unveil what it’s like to ultimately inject some original content into survival, and discuss some of the new features and innovations that DLC brings.
Ark Survival Ascended already has a remastered extension, and Ragnarok is the latest. Adding one of Ark’s biggest and most beautiful maps, along with many iconic creatures, its debut in the ASA has created a healthy uplift for players. But for so many Ark fans, it’s the world they’ve seen before – the outlook for the lost colony is so exciting. When I ask Stieglitz if thousands of players have not yet jumped from ASE to the ASA, one of the three core reasons he gives (with the suppression and time of the technology he invested in the original game) is that they want to see something Neat new. “They actually want a reason to reinvest their time, creatively,” he says. Now, the next expansion gives them exactly that.
“People are now beginning to taste it a bit (along with the Ragnarok) with the Lost Colony Expansion Pass we released,” Rapczak says. Pass adds some gameplay mechanics and creatures to the game that appears in the full release of the expansion, but more than that adds it. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think the whole map and all the new content that comes later is about blowing people away in terms of promoting the Ark story and linking it to what you’re trying to do later with these characters from Ark 2 onwards.”
“Previously, the only really, really original content we released for the ASA was Bob’s tall story. This was like a gameplay feature set,” adds Steiglitz. “It’s like, ‘Here’s some cool items and creatures,’ but it wasn’t like a new world or a new story. ”
Given this radical switch from remastering old content to creating something fresh from the same game, we ask whether Studio Wildcard is suffering from whiplash from there or is it a fun experience. “It’s really about throwing away the old creative skills that teams use for shorter-term improvements. (But now) we’re thinking more long-term about how we create a whole new world, a whole new map, a whole new character, a new storytelling element. “It’s something our team has been looking forward to for a long time.
“(We’re) expanding the way we tell the game’s story. A new MoCap facility was recently installed in the Seattle office. We’ve jumped into Unreal’s new metahuman toolset for some of the characters in the game. The fun building has lost colonies from a stage of concepts that are not bound by what we’ve done before (for life).”
Much is already known about the lost colonies. As Rapczak suggests, iconic characters from the Ark The Animated series (and their famous voice actors) appear. We know it will take place on Arat Prime, a frozen planet that the head of lore has learned several times over the years. And we know it tees up the story of Arc 2. This is an ambitious sequel that Stieglitz tells me that he might still be a few years away.
As mentioned earlier, when Lost Colony Exluence Pass drops alongside Ragnarok, players can take advantage of some of the new gameplay changes early. Currently available are Drakelings (a new miniature dragon that gives powerful passive buffs), veilwyn Tame, a new tool that allows you to save the base section as a template that can be used again.
“This could have a serious long-term metagame impact on the Ark mechanics (which Lost Colony adds) the skill tree is a whole new concept of ARK, but it’s clearly present in other games like Path of Exile,” says Stieglitz. “But do that thoroughly on the Ark, which departs in a very new direction.”
Regarding what else arrived in December, Stieglitz will make his debut with Lost Colony, teasing an unannounced feature. It has been demanding a significant amount over the years, and it is the core component of the fellow survival game Conan exile.
“One of the ideas of a lost colony is the NPC slar that you can sway to your side and that you can build an army like that is something we haven’t actually experimented with,” he says. “(We’re) trying to deal with human hostile NPCs in that space as well, so it’s very experimental. Some of it has something to do with what we (include) in Arc 2. Mechanics.”
More broadly, Rapczak states that the world of Arat Prime is also “built around a new type of gameplay we place (in a lost colony) that previously did not exist in the box.”
Despite all the wildcard efforts to advance Ark’s gameplay and become a truly new experience that can draw lost colonies into survival as Survival Ascendend’s survival, Stieglitz knows it’s important for teams to “lose the roots (of the Ark).”
“We’re a creature survival game,” he says without a doubt. “So you need a really cool tame. They need to be important to how the map works, cross the map, and survive the map. It must be there all the time. But within that kind of framework, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the creature’s aspects of what can be done to create more layers and depth in the gaming experience?”
As mentioned earlier, the Ark Survival Ascended Lost Colony Expansion is scheduled to be released in December 2025. It’s been the most important moment for Studio Wildcard since the ASA launched. Not only does its impact on the game, but how to crack the way you open the door to get a glimpse of what Ark 2 can do, and in terms of its story and its game evolution
