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Studio Wildcard has revealed that it's planning on releasing Ark 2, the full-fledged sequel to the original Ark: Survival Evolved, in 2028.
Studio Wildcard co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz gave a fairly comprehensive overview of the two-year roadmap for Ark: Survival Ascended, the updated remaster of Survival Evolved that released in 2023, during a presentation for parent company Snail Games' Investor Day (via the Epic Games Store). The game's first big expansion pack, Lost Colony, launches this week and kicks off the game's roadmap, which culminates in a big Q4 2027 expansion, Legacy of Santiago, that'll essentially let Studio Wildcard test out a bunch of ideas planned for the actual sequel.
"It's a prequel to ARK 2 that basically directly ties into that narrative and tests out a lot of that game's mechanics and features," said Stieglitz.
Asked specifically if the roadmap is intentionally suggesting a 2028 release for Ark 2, Stieglitz confirmed, "That's our intention," he told the Epic Games Store's Brian Crecente. "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. 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."
Ark 2 was first revealed back at the 2020 Game Awards with an action-packed cinematic trailer featuring a lot of Vin Diesel. And while the actor was originally set to star in the game, it sounds like it hasn't been decided just how much time he'll have to perform for the role, and curiously, Stieglitz said the sequel's narrative will largely be shaped by how much time Vin Diesel is willing to lend to the game.
"The question is: How much performance are we going to get from him?" Stieglitz said. "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."
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