Studio Wildcard’s ARK: Survival Evolved made a name for itself by being a highly addictive open world survival game featuring dinosaurs, but many people don’t know about its spin-off.
ARK: The Survival Of The Fittest is the MMO’s battle royale cousin, released in August 2017 just a few months after Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds – most likely trying to capitalize on the popularity of the genre.
Like any other game that gets rushed to capitalize on a trend, ARK: The Survival Of The Fittest had an extremely bad launch.
Players complained about bugs, lag, not enough players for matches to start, lack of servers and an overall lack of polish. ARK players also felt offended that the company was diverting their efforts on a spin-off instead of working on the main game, which was in early-access at the time.
The game did not have a playerbase for long, as it bordered on unplayable and the battle royale genre had players spoiled for choice at the time.
Survival Of The Fittest just sat on Steam for years getting negative reviews instead of just shutting down, seemingly forgotten by the studio, until now.
Studio Wildcard announced ARK: The Survival of the Fittest is getting a new “prototype”, a seemingly enhanced version of the game.
The studio explains the prototype will now be given the proper care and treatment it deserved:
While the core goal of The Survival of the Fittest remains the same, we’ve gone back to the drawing board and introduced a significant number of technical/quality of life/balance changes to the game mode that differs from ARK: Survival Evolved and the original version of Survival of the Fittest. These changes aim to make the experience more streamlined and accessible, eliminating the complex aspects of crafting & the steep learning curve, and empowering players to quickly form their Dino Armies and get to the creature-action faster.
A video showcasing the new features in the game also got released:
The game is now slowly turning its mixed reviews into positive ones on Steam, with players praising the new changes and hoping for more to come.
Only time will tell if ARK: The Survival Of The Fittest has what it takes to compete with the modern battle royale games that dominate the genre.
