The Biggest Differences Between Ark And Ark 2 Explained

It seems "Fast and Furious" will be meeting "The Flintstones" in the upcoming sequel to "Ark: Survival Evolved." Living up to its name, Studio Wildcard revealed a brand new trailer for "Ark 2" at the Xbox summer showcase starring Vin Diesel riding a dinosaur and narration by Auli'i Cravalho of "Moana." The eclectic assortment of surprises was accompanied by the announcement that "Ark 2" will be a very different game than the original "Ark." With massive upgrades to just about every core aspect of the gameplay — combat, crafting, building, and more — the new installment is shaping up to be an entirely next-generation revamp of the survival genre.

In an article posted to the official Xbox news site, franchise co-creators and studio co-founders Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak laid out what details they could share at this juncture. The game will have a single-player campaign featuring the characters shown in the trailer — father-daughter duo Santiago and Meeka — as well as an online co-op mode featuring all the gameplay changes that are meant to "retouch and improve on all aspects of what constitutes an Ark game."

The first and biggest change is to the fundamentals of how the player is allowed to navigate and interact with the world of "Ark." While the first game was a first or third-person experience more akin to the likes of "Skyrim" or a very high poly "Minecraft," the sequel will be restricted to third-person and feature much more responsive and immersive interactions. The developers cited "Assassin's Creed," "Breath of the Wild," and the Souls-like genre as their major inspirations for the changes. Players will be able to climb and explore in a more natural and intuitive manner, while the combat will be visceral, dynamic, and "player-reflex" based.

Other gameplay changes include quality-of-life improvements to the crafting and building systems as well as all-new additions like Creature Management and a fully integrated World Map. An interesting thing to note is that build templates can, apparently, be saved and shared across platforms much like the blueprints system in "Fallout 4."

That's not the only improvement to the multiplayer infrastructure in store. There will be full cross-platform mod support in "Ark 2" to accompany the game's crossplay capabilities, and mods made on the PC version can simply be uploaded for console players to use. With all these improvements and player-minded changes planned, it seems "Ark" fans are in for a real treat come 2023 — hopefully, they'll be getting a more concrete release date sometime soon.