Ark Ragnarok Delay And New Feature Infodump

Stu­dio Wild­card post­ed the pre­vi­ous­ly announced “State Of The Game” Post on their offi­cial forums today. Part of the Announce­ment did con­firm that Rag­narok has been delayed until the retail launch of the game on August 8th.

This is a huge hit to the con­sole play­ers who have been strug­gling with the bug­gy game and the con­stant­ly delayed patch­es and con­tent. Fear not my fel­low sur­vivors, some big stuff is com­ing up and its pret­ty damn excit­ing. You’ll be see­ing more about that lat­er down this article.

Let’s start from the top:

Will The Servers Be Wiped?

No. Depend­ing on how you look at it, this is a good thing. Wild­card seems to have found a good mid­dle ground for lega­cy play­ers and new play­ers alike. All cur­rent offi­cial servers will become Lega­cy servers on August 8th. Play­ers will be able to stay and play on the serv­er they have been build­ing on and still trans­fer between the oth­er lega­cy servers in the clus­ter. New PVP and PVE clus­ters will be added at launch that will not allow trans­fer­ring of any lega­cy char­ac­ters, items or dinos, giv­ing new play­ers a good place to start. We have pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten that we think Ark’s offi­cial servers should be wiped at launch, The actions Wild­card is tak­ing seems to be the best mid­dle ground for all players.

Low Population Servers Will Be Wiped Over Time.

Bet­ter start being nice to the noobs, Low pop­u­la­tion servers will be get­ting “re-pur­posed” from time to time.

Our cur­rent set of Offi­cial Servers will be re-brand­ed as “Lega­cy” and indi­cat­ed as such on all plat­forms. We will also be tak­ing steps to remove some of our ‘ghost town’ servers, where the play­er pop­u­la­tion has remained near-zero for an extend­ed dura­tion of time. We’ll take a look at the sta­tis­tics and will be re-pur­pos­ing 10% of the low­est count servers across all plat­forms. Once we know which servers these are; we’ll pre­serve the save files and upload them, so if you so wish to use them, you can. Play­ers will also have time to move through Cross-ARK to a dif­fer­ent secure Lega­cy serv­er. Every three months we will be tak­ing a review of the Lega­cy Offi­cials to see what the num­bers are like and may con­sid­er re-pur­pos­ing more ‘ghost towns’, how­ev­er, the goal will be to pre­serve any place with human activ­i­ty. — Jat, Lead Com­mu­ni­ty Man­ag­er and Asso­ciate Pro­duc­er at Stu­dio Wildcard

Looks like we all need to start being nicer to the new sur­vivors on offi­cial servers if we want our servers to not be wiped. Lega­cy servers will still receive full DLC and sup­port, Just like they do now.

To be clear, if you’re play­ing on a Lega­cy Serv­er you will not be able to trans­fer to the new Offi­cial servers and Lega­cy servers will still receive total and com­plete sup­port (just like the New Offi­cials) in regards to Game Updates and future ARK Expan­sions, so you can expect to see future DLC servers added to the Lega­cy Clus­ter.- Jat, Lead Com­mu­ni­ty Man­ag­er and Asso­ciate Pro­duc­er at Stu­dio Wildcard

Ragnarok For Console Delayed Again

Ear­li­er this week we wrote about the upcom­ing free new ark Ragnarok being delayed for con­soles for the 3rd time. Today a new date was giv­en. PS4 and Xbox One play­ers will get Rag­narok for free on August 8th, the same day Ark has its retail launch. This piss­es me off too because we have been wait­ing and wait­ing and con­stant­ly deal­ing with delays. The Upside to this is that August 8th is a release date, not an ETA. No More of that ETA bullshit.

The new offi­cial release date for the Rag­narok Free DLC on con­soles will be on the 8th of August when ARK launch­es for retail release. The team spent time dis­cussing when would be the best time to release the map, for both tech­ni­cal rea­sons, as well as the expe­ri­ence itself, and this was the cho­sen date.- Jat, Lead Com­mu­ni­ty Man­ag­er and Asso­ciate Pro­duc­er at Stu­dio Wildcard

What About The PS4 Patch?

Jat also addressed that today saying,

It’s hap­pen­ing! Yes, we’re seri­ous. We’re cur­rent­ly work­ing on the lat­est PS4 patch with Abstrac­tion at the moment, and while it’ll be tough, we should be set to release it this Fri­day (prob­a­bly going to be a late evening patch). We’ll keep you post­ed how that goes! Thank you guys for being so patient with us over the past few weeks, we under­stand how frus­trat­ing it is not to receive updates, but now we are wrapped up with cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and this tight dead­line, we’ll be able to go back to our stan­dard devel­op­ment pipeline and there­fore include you with our updates 

I hope they keep their word on this, I hon­est­ly believe it is their last chance to make this right before they lose even more of their PS4 player­base, which as of now has almost dou­ble the con­sole sales of Xbox One.

Wait.…. There’s More

Today is a day that we at Fix The Meta have been wait­ing for.….

 As of the 8th of August, we will final­ly have sup­port for PC host­ed ded­i­cat­ed servers on con­sole. We won’t be rent­ing or host­ing them our­selves, it isn’t a com­mer­cial ven­ture for us, but we will be doing the tech­ni­cal work need­ed to get this under­way. Ini­tial­ly, they will be avail­able via Nitra­do! (It’ll come to oth­er third par­ty hosts once we go through this ini­tial tech­ni­cal-iter­a­tion phase, as we want to ensure its sta­bil­i­ty).- Jat, Lead Com­mu­ni­ty Man­ag­er and Asso­ciate Pro­duc­er at Stu­dio Wildcard

This is big, No longer will a sec­ond con­sole be required to run, Ded­i­cat­ed pri­vate serv­er and clus­ters. We will be able to host full out Cross Ark clus­ters with Cross Ark trans­fers while using our own cus­tom rate and xp settings.

These servers will be avail­able on both Xbox One and PlaySta­tion 4 and if you haven’t real­ized, here’s why this is so awesome:

• No need for a sec­ond con­sole to host pri­vate servers!
• Com­plete access to all of ARKs cus­tom serv­er con­fig set­tings, which will let play­ers change the rules on their cus­tom ARKs
• The option to cre­ate cross ARK Clus­ters for the ulti­mate ARK Expe­ri­ence — allow­ing trav­el across four Maps
• Cre­ate a back­up of serv­er save files, allow­ing play­ers to try some­thing new with­out the fear of los­ing data
• The servers will result in high­er per­for­mance due to bet­ter optimization
• Play­er servers will now be able to sup­port a larg­er pool of play­ers, up to 100 con­cur­rent users!
• At a lat­er date, these will also be Play Any­where compatible!

We will be host­ing a clus­ter with All 4 maps with Ark Trav­el, More info about that is on our Ark PS4 Serv­er page.

There is a lot of good stuff hap­pen­ing here and Rag­narok being delayed until the 8th of August is very, very frus­trat­ing. The new abil­i­ty to host cus­tom clus­ters is a big deal. Expect great things com­ing to pri­vate Ark servers.

If you want to read this “State Of The Game” post in its entire­ty, head over to the Offi­cial Ark Forums and check it out.

Are you excit­ed about any of this state of the game post? Let us know below!!