Ark: Survival Ascended, the Unreal Engine 5 remake of Survival Evolved, released in early access on Steam yesterday during the Xbox Partner Preview. Players were eager to jump in and try it for themselves, but they quickly found the performance lacking, which led to an influx of negative reviews that brought the Steam score down to 'Mixed'.

"I want to see the NASA PC that this game was tested on before releasing to the public," MrFreshFruits wrote.

YouTuber Game Tester posted a video breaking down the different graphical presets while using various DLSS settings to show off the performance on a 3070 ti with a Ryzen 9 5900x at 1440p. Unfortunately, on High with balanced DLSS, the game stutters. Just running through the woods causes fps to drop down to 15-20, which is made significantly worse when dinosaurs are thrown into the mix.

Similar accounts can be found on the Steam page. "RTX 3080 and can only get 50fps on LOW settings, this is no way, shape, or form a better game," ChefGeeky said.

Game looks incredible. However, 14fps on Medium settings running on a 3070 with DLSS... Do with that what you will.

"RTX 4090 and the game crashes constantly," SammyStew wrote. "Cannot achieve steady 65+ frames without sacrificing fidelity, getting refunded."

It's not just performance that players are unhappy with, but how Ark: Survival Ascended has been rolled out. If you own the original, you still have to pay full price to get the remake (well, sort of - it launched with a ten percent discount).

"This should have been a free upgrade to all past Ark: Survival Evolved owners," FailureToReport said. "They're going to call this early access again? Drip feeding maps for the next year or longer? So I guess Ark 2 is a long way out and in need of money, huh".

It also has no private servers right now, and the official servers were wiped within only four hours after players discovered exploits, which has soured fans further. "Returned for now since dedicated servers are not available yet," Lesbillionaire said. "Game looked okay and ran alright. Skeeved out by not having the ability to host servers without using Nitrado."

An official tweet of the game's launch trailer from Ark's socials is flooded with comments about the poor performance, but developer Wildcard has yet to comment on the problem, and there are no updates on the Steam page itself.

Hopefully, things get ironed out soon, but plenty are claiming to have refunded the game out of frustration, while many others are flocking back to the original for the time being.



Posted: Oct 30, 2023 2:30 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/ark-survival-ascended-mixed-reviews-steam-poor-performance/