As part of its celebrations around the tenth anniversary of the Ark franchise, Snail Games revealed that the game that started it all, Ark Survival Evolved, is getting a new expansion - Ark Aquatica. However, it's already got off on the wrong foot due to its reveal trailer containing more than a hefty dose of AI-generate footage. Now, a Snail Games developer confirms that those actually creating the expansion "did not know" about the AI trailer, and calms fears that Aquatica itself may feature AI-generated content.
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What's the going rate for a flight to attend GDC these days? I ask because I'd have loved to be buzzing my merry way about the convention walls when Snail Games USA unveiled this doozy of an AI-generated trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved's Aquatica expansion. I'd give it a solid nine on the "we're not even trying to disguise it any longer" scale. How bad is it? Bad enough that original developers Studio Wildcard hastily and firmly distanced themselves from the project, reiterating that their focus was on ARK: Survival Ascended and Ark 2.
If I had to sum up the trailer in a single word, I would attempt to write that word out with four-day old regurgitated Alphabetti spaghetti, invariably failing to give voice to my flailing disgust before retiring to the corner to fart at god. This would still take approximately fourteen times more effort than whoever got paid to write "like the ocean, but worse" into their phone to tease out the following results.
March 18 at 8:50am PDT Snail Games has now confirmed that Ark Aquatica is a new DLC for Ark Survival Evolved. The headline and body of this article has been updated to reflect the new information.
Studio Wildcard and Snail Games have just thrown a big old party for the Ark franchise's tenth birthday. While Ark 2 is sadly absent, it has fully revealed the new expansion for Ark Survival Evolved and dropped a preview of the next season of Ark: The Animated Series. Oh, and out of the blue, it also announced a mysterious new project called Ark Aquatica. Initially sounding like an all new game that could be a seafaring survival adventure like Subnautica, it's in fact a new DLC for Ark Survival Evolved - the first expansion for the first Ark game in some time.
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Ark: Survival Evolved remains one of the biggest and best survival games around. Taking the touchstones of crafting and base building to an island infested with dinosaurs, it continues to dominate Steam all these years later. With concurrent players regularly over the 40,000 mark and a whopping 536,000 reviews at 84% positive since launch, the original Ark is still some of the best the survival genre has to offer. This formula came to mobile late last year in the form of Ark: Ultimate Mobile Edition, and this version keeps going from strength to strength.
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