ARK: Survival Ascended
This is ARK: Survival Evolved from 2017, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5. The dinosaurs you knock out and tame, the bases and the hostile players are still there. What changed is the engine, the fate of the original and the mods.
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Back in January 2023, Studio Wildcard co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz suggested owners of the original would get the remaster as a complete free upgrade. That free upgrade never happened, and the studio planned to shut the official Survival Evolved servers around the remaster's release.
The mods turned out better. In November 2023, mods made on PC ran on consoles for the first time in the series, and modded servers opened to players from every platform.
The game entered early access on PC in October 2023, and the launch was rough. Players complained about frame drops and crashes, the console versions slipped to November, and on a stream Stieglitz admitted the servers were running terribly. Even so, it sold more than 600,000 copies in its first two weeks and 4 million by May 2026. On Steam it has 60% positive out of 109,422 reviews. In our Recommended Score it ranks #4,114 of 4,736.
Liked it? Try Enshrouded, where you cannot last long inside a thick fog and the land around your home can be reshaped, and Grounded, where heroes shrunk by a science experiment survive in a backyard full of insects.
Major updates
Therizino TLC, Cerberax and Gargantar are out now! · Sep 2026All 5
System requirements
Minimum RX 5600 XT · 16 GB RAM · 180 GB✓Steam Deck VerifiedMin & recommended
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| OS | Windows 10/11 with updates | Windows 10/11 with updates |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K | AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K |
| Memory | 16 GB | 32 GB |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT, NVIDIA GeForce 1080 | AMD Radeon RX 6800, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 |
| DirectX | 12 | 12 |
| Storage | 180 GB | 180 GB |
From the game’s Steam store page.
