It was a standout moment at The Game Awards 2020 showcase. Ark: Survival Evolved was only three years old and a sequel was coming. More importantly, it starred Vin Diesel in one of the most unforgettable CGI renderings of a human face ever put on screen. Five years later, though, Ark 2 is still nowhere in sight and another big delay means it won’t be released until over a decade after the first game at the earliest.
At least if you believe it’s still coming out at all. I’m less convinced with each fresh setback. Studio Wildcard cofounder Jeremy Stieglitz revealed at publisher Snail Games’ investor day this week that the new timeline for release is 2028. There’s instead a big update for the existing game coming in late 2027 that will reportedly serve as an introduction to some of the new mechanics and story beats coming in Ark 2.
“Legacy of Santiago is going to involve a lot of the new fighting and combat mechanics that we want to experiment with, with ARK 2: Soulslike third-person combat, melee combat, and so forth,” Stieglitz said in an interview on the Epic Games Store. “But it’s not going to have all this, like, crazy narrative world build-out content that we want to do with ARK 2, if the mechanics seem to work well with Legacy of Santiago, then the key selling point of ARK 2 could be that there is this giant campaign narrative that sits as a standalone product.”
But plans can change, as they’ve repeatedly done since Ark 2‘s original announcement. The game was first set to launch in 2023. Then it was pushed to an Early Access release in 2024. That year came and went with no updates. Earlier this year, Stieglitz said in an interview that he hoped it would arrive in Early Access by 2027 instead. Less than six months later, it’s now coming in 2028. Vin Diesel’s role in the game, which at one point included actually helping to create it, has also been, shall we say, fluid.
Ark: Survival Evolved is currently working with The Boys star Karl Urban, and he might end up taking on a bigger role in Ark 2 as well. Vin Diesel’s involvement remains harder to pin down. “The question is: How much performance are we going to get from him?” Stieglitz said this week. “Are we going to get one day, five days, eight hours? You don’t know. And the scope of how much performance we are going to get determines just how the narrative is going to play out. We have a narrative that’s, if we get a lot of Vin Diesel, this is what we will do, and if we get a little Vin Diesel, this is what we will do.”
