Absurd Bugs of New ARK; RTX Options Display Only in English
ARK: Survival Ascended is another Unreal Engine 5 title failing optimization at launch, but players also encountered a more unusual glitch.
Popular Internet wisdom holds that the number of bugs appearing in new games is evidence of developers treating players like beta testers. Leaving aside the complexity of today's video games, many of the hits (and "sh**s") of 2023 seem to confirm this thesis. In particular, ARK: Survival Ascended on release has graced fans with bugs that are hard not to consider absurd.
Unreal Engine 5 unchanged
Remake of the popular prehistoric survival game was created on Unreal Engine 5, which, admittedly, has great potential, but previous games powered by this technology happened to have had quite a few problems, mainly with performance. Unfortunately, Survival Ascended did not break with this particular tradition.
- Unstable performance and frequent crashes to desktop are perhaps the most common complaint against the new ARK. Crashes happen during gameplay, but also at the character creation stage and at game launch.
- This is partly due to problems with the servers, which apparently are very unreliable.
- Performance of ARK: Survival Ascended leaves much to be desired. On higher settings cards of the likes of GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 have trouble maintaining 30 frames per second. The game is handled relatively well by the RTX 4090, except that, first of all, it can hardly be considered a compliment to the ARK, and secondly, even this monster does not in all players guarantee stable play at a minimum of 60 fps.
RTX (only) in English
Poor optimization of the game certainly spoils the fun for players, but it is nevertheless a (sad) standard. However, there are also glitches that distinguish the new ARK against the competition, by no means on the plus side.
- For it seems that the RTX options menu (DLSS, ray tracing) does not appear if you launch the game in a language other than English.
- To make things more fun, ARK: Survival Ascended does not enable you to change the language from within the game. This can only be done through the launch options available in the properties from within the game collection of Steam. For English, the relevant command is "culture=en."
In this context, it is hardly surprising that fans are review bombinb the remake on Steam. Currently only 43% of the more than 7,700 reviews on ARK: Survival Ascended are positive. The extent of the problems is evidenced by the fact that questions and complaints about glitches have almost completely overshadowed the occasional whining about the fundamental lack of novelty (despite a few warmly received changes) or the shutdown of the original's official servers without making the remake available as a free update for owners of Survival Evolved (vide Steam).
What do the developers have to say about it? Well, their first post-release entry in theory summed up "day one" of Survival Ascended. It also informed that the game received an update to improve its performance and provided new graphics settings. Apparently, it was effective, because some players gained about 20 fps or more compared to the state before the hotfix was released (via Steam). Unfortunately, the full list of changes was missing, so we don't know if the glitch with RTX options has been fixed.
ARK: Survival Ascended is also heading to consoles, but early access release on PS5 and XSX/S has been delayed until November.. Maybe it's for the better, given the game's problems on PC.
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Author: Jacob Blazewicz
Graduated with a master's degree in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw with a thesis dedicated to this very subject. Started his adventure with gamepressure.com in 2015, writing in the Newsroom and later also in the film and technology sections (also contributed to the Encyclopedia). Interested in video games (and not only video games) for years. He began with platform games and, to this day, remains a big fan of them (including Metroidvania). Also shows interest in card games (including paper), fighting games, soulslikes, and basically everything about games as such. Marvels at pixelated characters from games dating back to the time of the Game Boy (if not older).
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