ARK: Survival Ascended is Studio Wildcard's Unreal Engine 5 rebuild of Survival Evolved, sold as a separate game. It entered Early Access on PC on 25 October 2023, reached Xbox Series and PS5 that November, and is still in Early Access.
The core is unchanged: tame and breed dinosaurs, build bases, form tribes and manage hunger, thirst and weather. On top come dynamic lighting, water and foliage physics and a reworked interface. Mods install from inside the game on every platform, and tribes can mix PC and console players. Public servers hold up to 70 people, private sessions up to 8, with two-player split-screen too. Maps from the old game are added at no extra cost.
Pick it for ARK with cross-platform mods. The caveat is Early Access: the launch came with crashes and frame drops.
