Microsoft teases Ark 2 for 2023

On PC, Xbox, and cloud devices

An Ark 2 is in the mix now thanks to new news from a Microsoft showcase during “E3” week: so uh, look forward to it!

Here’s the spiel straight from Microsoft:

“Survive the past. Tame the future. Suddenly awakened on a primal world filled with dinosaurs and humans struggling for dominance, you must team-up with legendary heroes to confront powerful dark forces. Saddle up, and join the definitive next-gen survival experience with ARK 2.”

And here are some core gameplay tenets:

• Advanced character traversal mechanics include mantling, free-climbing, parkour, sliding, and swinging!
• Fully stackable, user-created Mods for new creatures, items, and gameplay features, with maps distributed across all platforms – including onto Xbox – and support for modded servers enabled through official mod support by mod.io.
• Target-lock, blocks, dodges, combos, staggers, and special attacks all emphasize player-skill-based action.
• Explore a mysterious, chaotic world where native flora and fauna are being overrun by invasive primeval creatures, from an extinct Earth.
• Construct weapons and tools from a range of distinct modules to customize their look and functionality — millions of possible combinations enable players to craft their own unique gear! Specific materials will further affect the appearance of items, with multiple resource options in unique regions of the world.
• Natural and unnatural occurrences are always happening across the game world, independent of your presence! Your choices in deciding whether to interact with these events will yield rewards or challenges.
• Hostile ‘Aratai’ hunt & attack you while riding their own tamed creatures, as they seek to drive human interlopers from their world.

“Suddenly awakened,” eh? Well here’s hoping there will be some sort of interesting twist in terms of lore to build upon the prior strategy foundation of the original. Sometimes survival games can be tough to get into if the hook isn’t strong enough, from multiple angles. I’ve fizzled out on various survival genre games for a ton of reasons, those included!

Although we don’t have much to go on at the moment, Ark seems to have done really well for itself, especially before the survival genre started to get a little more saturated. Now it arguably has more to prove, and we just have a cinematic right now.

Microsoft says it’ll be out on PC, Xbox consoles, and cloud devices next year. It is a timed console exclusive and will arrive on PlayStation platforms and Switch “at a later date.”