Ark Survival Evolved

Studio Wildcard's Ark: Survival Evolved has been in development for quite some time now. The game managed to make huge waves when it first appeared in Early Access back in the summer of 2015, and now it's prepping for its full release in August, despite running into a hiccup and hitting a delay. Over on the official Studio Wildcard website, the developers revealed that it had to delay the release of Ark: Survival Evolved, pushing back to the end of the month so that it's now releasing on August 29th for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
So why the delay exactly? Well, the post reveals that the game only recently went gold after being officially certified by the console manufacturers. The problem was that certification took a lot longer than anticipated, and forced the game out of its original launch on August 8th.

The delay means that the Ragnarok expansion map, which features volcanoes and other hazards, will also be forced back. The Ragnarok expansion contains an all new area for players to explore, along with all new biomes that add new wildlife, dangers, and items to loot and craft. The team is also adding in new engrams and a brand new boss encounter.

According to the post, Studio Wildcard has plans on focusing more on immediately patching and fixing up some lingering issues on the PC side of Ark: Survival Evolved.

There isn't much that the developers can do now that the game has gone gold for PS4 and Xbox One, other than possibly work on a day-one patch. For PC, however, there are no certification restrictions, so the first thing that will be done is bring up the PC performance and optimize the game to run a lot better.

Optimization has been one of the biggest complaints regarding Ark on PC, much like every other open-world survival game, such as DayZ, Rust, and Space Engineers, all of which suffer from some serious optimization issues.

A lot of those problems come from the fact that these are open-world games with high-end graphics and lots of taxing features and processes, such as AI, multiple players, day and night cycles, and some physics-based elements.

Studio Wildcard is also promising to fix the difficulty on multiplayer boss fights, for which many people have claimed to be almost impossible to beat. A greater degree of balance will be added to the boss fights.

Mesh exploits will be fixed, so people can no longer squiggle through the geometry and move around the map unseen.

And one thing that will be really interesting that the team is adding to the table, is PC-style dedicated servers for console players. This is a pretty neat feature that will allow gamers to rent servers for the console version of Ark and play with their friends, not unlike what EA has setup for the Battlefield games on home consoles.

One of the other big updates will also include improved security measures to mitigate the server-load from DDOS attacks. This should make it less likely for official servers to go kaput during a DDOS attack during peak play-times.

You can expect to see the updates for Ark: Survival Evolved go live on PC soon enough, along with the official launch on PS4 and Xbox One set to take place on August 29th at the end of the month.