Ark Developer Breaks Down Unreal Engine Upgrades and In-Game World Creator

Alright! What's new with Studio Wildcard?

Jeremy Stieglitz, Co-Founder, Co-Creative Director, and Lead Designer: This week, we announced some details about where Ark: Survival Ascended is going. We talked about the new map coming out in June, another one in December, and the World Creator, which will probably be extremely interesting.

Today, I won’t give you the marketing speak. I’ll get into the nuts and bolts. And the reason is we actually have real nuts and bolts to talk about. Plans are easy. Everybody has plans. But as Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. The same applies to games.

One of the less exciting things is that we’re upgrading Ark: Survival Ascended, which is our live Ark game, to the latest version of Unreal Engine. It’s not glamorous. Every game eventually has to do it. 

When you’re working with a live service game, occasionally you have to take the entire project and migrate it forward. With Unreal Engine specifically, Epic releases these huge updates. You can cherry-pick individual features, but that becomes risky when the engine changes significantly, and features become tightly integrated.

At that point, upgrading the entire engine becomes necessary if you want the latest improvements, especially for a game that’s been running for multiple years. ASA has already been operating for two and a half years, so it’s time again.

The cost is development time. You basically have to regression test the entire game and assume everything is broken.

Makes sense. I'm sure oftentimes a lot of things really are broken.

Jeremy Stieglitz: Exactly. But what players get in return is improved performance. We’re moving from Unreal Engine 5.5 to 5.7, which includes a lot of major performance improvements. Rendering thread optimizations are part of it, but the biggest improvement is virtualized culling of Nanite meshes.

Previously, Nanite worked like this: if the mesh was in the scene, it rendered. Even if it was barely visible, there was still overhead. Now, Epic has introduced a system that breaks Nanite meshes into voxels. Depending on which voxels are visible, the engine can compute far less of the mesh. That’s especially beneficial in scenes with lots of overlapping meshes.

It’s essentially a much more efficient way of determining what the engine doesn’t need to process. For example, we tested heavily forested and jungle scenes with lots of overlapping meshes and saw massive improvements. There’s basically no accuracy cost. It’s a pure performance win. Honestly, it probably should have been there from day one.

What can you tell me about new content updates coming?

Jeremy Stieglitz: In June, we’re releasing an expansion called Tides of Fortune. It’s actually a gameplay layer on top of a free map.

Typically, we release about one free map per year and one premium map per year. This year’s free map is Genesis Part 1, which originally appeared in Ark: Survival Evolved. In Ark: Survival Ascended, we’re fully remastering it with new art, lighting, and improved level design.

The new gameplay layer introduces large-scale ocean gameplay. Genesis originally had a water region, but it was small. Now we’re expanding it dramatically, like miles of open water. Players who purchase the gameplay layer will gain access to large physical ships. You can mount cannons, attach modules, and even transport dinosaurs on them.

Everyone will also get improved ocean physics and buoyancy systems regardless of whether they buy the upgrade. We actually learned a lot about networking large-scale water systems from Atlas, our pirate game. It gave us experience with networking water, buoyancy physics, and large-scale rendering challenges.

You also mentioned the World Creator. Can you talk about that a bit?

Jeremy Stieglitz: So, Ark has supported modding since 2015. With Ark: Survival Ascended, players can download a full development kit based on the Unreal Engine editor and create mods.

What’s unusual about Ark is that mods work cross-platform. Mods can run on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation with the same functionality. Players can create entirely new assets, blueprints, and gameplay systems. But the downside is accessibility to the tools.

To use the dev kit properly, you basically need a professional-level PC. The dev kit itself requires around one terabyte of storage, and realistically, you need 32–64GB of RAM to work comfortably. Because of that, only about 1–2% of our player base can realistically develop mods.

But we believe over 50% of players would be interested in creating content if it were easier. So World Creator is our solution. It’s essentially a level editor built directly into the game.

Wait, so even on consoles?

Jeremy Stieglitz: Yes. It runs on Xbox and PlayStation. Right now, it requires a mouse and keyboard, even on console, because the interface is designed to mimic Unreal Editor.

It provides access to the full asset library of the game: particle systems, meshes, skeletal assets, and more. Users can modify actors, edit properties, and save templates just like they would in Unreal. You can modify existing levels or build entirely new ones.

The really interesting part is scripting. Without scripting, you can create a level, but it doesn’t actually do anything. We couldn’t embed Unreal’s Blueprint editor in the runtime version of the game, so instead we implemented a Lua scripting system.

Players can write Lua scripts that respond to actor events like ticks, collisions, spawning, destruction, and more. Those scripts can call any Blueprint function in the game through the Blueprint API. That gives the system incredible flexibility.

Anything you could normally do in Blueprint can technically be done with Lua in our World Creator; it's just written as text instead of nodes. Of course, it’s slower because Lua is interpreted, but it’s more than fast enough for gameplay triggers, traps, objectives, or custom game modes.

But with the World Creator, especially on consoles, players won't be able to import or create new assets, right?

Jeremy Stieglitz: Correct, for now. But another major feature is that user-created worlds can use any existing mods. So, if someone creates a world and wants different art assets, they can include mods in their world configuration. When another player installs that world, the game automatically checks which mods are required and prompts the player to install them.

It’s basically the same workflow as joining a modded server.

What else is on the horizon?

Jeremy Stieglitz: Looking ahead, we have a dragon-themed expansion planned for the end of 2026. Dragons will behave differently from traditional Ark creatures. Instead of simple tame mechanics, they’ll have a bonding system. The bond increases or decreases depending on how the player treats the dragon. Each species has different preferences, so players have to learn how to care for them properly.

We’re also giving dragons more independent AI behaviors. The map itself will feature floating sky islands, inspired a bit by Skies of Arcadia.

Studio Wildcard, Game Development Studio

Interview conducted by David Jagneaux