Fans of the sci-fi, dino-taming survival game ARK: Survival Ascended will get their first taste of the long-anticipated sequel—ARK 2—in a major update hitting near the end of 2027.

ARK 2, Jeremy Stieglitz, co-founder of developer Studio Wildcard, said, is currently planned for a 2028 release.

The news came during publisher Snail Games’ Investor Day held at the NASDAQ Marketsite building in Times Square earlier this week, during which the studio walked through the game’s impressive milestones, details of a deeper relationship with actor Karl Urban, and plans for the franchise’s next two years.

Stieglitz walked attendees through the popular game’s two-year roadmap, which culminates in the release of Legacy of Santiago, a major expansion that will both narratively seed the release of ARK 2 as well as test out some of the new mechanics coming to the sequel.

Evolving ARK: Survival Evolved

ARK: Survival Evolved has an interesting, nearly ten-year history. Development on the game started in 2014 with a team of ten or so. The initial early access release hit in 2015. Two years ago, the team released what was essentially a remaster of their game, shifting it from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. The new title, ARK: Survival Ascended, is now the most recent iteration of the game.

Snail Games has sold more than 4 million copies of the new version of the game, which also heavily supports user-generated content on all of the platforms on which the game is available. That means players on Windows PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 all have access to those mods, which include everything from new creations and character costumes to new maps and game modes.

“They’ve created over 5,000 mods since that feature was introduced, and there’ve been over 750 million of those mods downloaded,” Stieglitz said. “It’s really become a core feature of the game.”

The first major expansion pack coming to the game hits this week. ARK: Lost Colony is set to both advance the narrative and scope of the game, but also deliver a lot of new features that Stieglitz said will change the nature of the title. 

In an ARK first, for instance, you will be able to recruit human characters to your tribe that are controlled by the computer. The computer will also have bases that you can raid.

The vampire-themed release will also feature more than a baker’s dozen of new creatures, including the frame-shifting Ossidon, telekinetic Aureliax, and evolving fox familiars, as well as feral Neophytes, Revenant swarms, laser-wielding Gloon, and the colossal Gigadesmodus flying fortress.

The story of Lost Colony will be delivered through MAPPA anime scenes starring Michelle Yeoh and UE5 Metahuman cinematics with Madeleine Madden, Auli'i Cravalho, and Karl Urban, who reprises his role as strong guy survivor “Bob”. 

This will also be the first time players get a chance to see what the newly modeled, Karl Urban-inspired Bob looks like. The Urban-look-alike will also be making appearances in upcoming DLC Bob's True Tales: Tides of Fortune (expected in 2026) and Bob's True Tales: Galaxy Wars (planned for 2027).

This week’s launch of The Lost Colony DLC kicks off what Stieglitz detailed as the two-year road map for the game.

ARK: Survival Ascended to 2028

Next year will kick off with a new iteration of the esports-focused take on ARK: Survival Ascended, ARK: Survival of the Fittest. The prototype spin-off of the core game has up to 60 players taking each other on in a fast-paced game of survival that features a showdown between dinosaur armies.

Stieglitz noted that Studio Wildcard has “never had time to devote internal resources to the game.”

“Studio Siren is going to take it and essentially make it into a fully fledged feature that’s well-supported and treated as essentially an ongoing esports service for the game,” he said. “It’s going to be very exciting to see what they do with it.”

In the second quarter, the studio will release a new expansion called Bob’s True Tales: Tides of Fortune, a pirate-themed expansion that will hit alongside a map release called ARK Genesis.

In the third quarter of 2026, the team plans to release the ARK World Creator, something that Stieglitz says will help turn the modding tools in the game into something more akin to what is seen in Fortnite’s UEFN or Roblox.

“This is an entirely new feature that is similar to modding, but what it allows people to do is make new content inside the game, so they won't have to use an external set of tools on PC,” Stieglitz said. “We're really excited about this. We think we're only touching about five percent, maybe, of people who have an idea they want to create. This will get us closer to 90 percent of people who want to make something in ARK.”

In the fourth quarter, ARK Dragontopia hits. The first quarter of 2027 brings with it ARK Atlantis.

The second quarter of 2027 gets ARK: Bob’s True Tales Galaxy Wars.

“It is all about spaceships,” Stieglitz said. “Spaceship battling, large capital ships, star fighters,  and so forth.”

The final quarter of 2027 delivers to players their first taste of ARK 2 with Legacy of Santiago, but most likely not the last update for ARK: Survival Ascended.

“It's a prequel to ARK 2 that basically directly ties into that narrative and tests out a lot of that game’s mechanics and features.”

ARK 2 

There are a lot of lessons that feed into ARK 2. Lessons learned about the game engine, lessons learned about fan support, and lessons learned about moving a passionate audience from one game to the next.

Stieglitz and the team working on the ARK sequel hope to incorporate all of that into the game.

But to get the timing of ARK 2’s release out of the way, I asked Stieglitz if the inference made by looking at the two-year roadmap is correct, that ARK 2 will be hitting in 2028.

“That’s our intention,” he said in an interview following the presentation. “One of the things about doing ARK 2 was that we felt we had to learn a lot more about how to make the kind of game we wanted to do, and to do it kind of in phases. Learning about both the technology and the mechanics seemed, to us, safer than to just try to go and release a whole standalone product called ARK 2. 

“So with this expansion called Legacy of Santiago, we're going to be introducing a lot of the mechanics and features that we wanted to kind of test out in ARK 2 as an expansion for ARK: Survival Ascended.”

In some ways, it’s similar to how the team used the release of ARK: Survival Ascended to refine their ability to use Unreal Engine 5, he said.

“Legacy of Santiago will allow us to explore a lot of mechanics that we want to do with ARK 2, but it kind of derisks that, " he added. “Essentially, if we don't do it right, if we don't do it perfectly, we're able to iterate on it with a live game and get a lot more feedback than to just release something standalone. It's much safer for us to get a lot of that feedback in a live game where we can react much more fluidly to what players are telling us.”

This approach to ARK 2, was in some ways, driven by some of the early issues found in the release of ARK: Survival Ascended. Another important lesson that came out of that game’s launch is making sure that players are ready to leave the previous title behind when the studio shifts its attention to the new one.

“One thing we learned is to not say goodbye until your players want you to,” he said. “To be honest with you, we kind of just hard-stopped updating ARK: Survival Evolved, and we're like, ‘OK, we're done with it.’ And actually, players were kind of mad about that, because they weren't ready, they wanted more content at that point.”

Stieglitz said that, arguably, Unreal Engine 4 was too out of date to deliver the sort of upgrades the team wanted to bring to the game, but the team still saw that there was a better approach to launching ARK 2.

“With ARK: Survival Ascended, we’ll keep working on it, even if it’s not the only thing we’re doing,” he said. “We’ll keep working on making content for it as long as people still want to play it and pay for content, because we made that mistake with our transition from ARK: Survival Evolved.”

A big thing the team keeps in mind while working on the ARK franchise is that they have to design their new offerings in a way that is going to add to their player base, but won’t leave the existing player base behind. 

While testing out a lot of their new ideas for ARK 2 in the last ARK: Survival Ascended expansion of 2027 allows the team to be a bit more careful with what they introduce in terms of gameplay mechanics to the sequel, it could also steal some of that future game’s thunder.

Stieglitz called that notion a “future problem.”

“I don't have quite the answer to that yet. My general view on it is that it probably comes down to content. 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. 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.”

And narratively, the team has a very clear idea of where they want to go. In terms of the story, while the Legacy of Santiago will have some connecting tissue, in general, it’s more of a side story to the bigger epic arc of the game.

“We have a much more ambitious narrative built out for ARK 2,” he said. “But I’m going to be blunt, it’s really going to be highly dependent on just how involved Vin Diesel is actually going to be, which is still an open question.”

Back in 2020, Studio Wildcard released a trailer announcing ARK 2 and that it would star Vin Diesel.  And while Diesel still likes the game, it’s unclear how much time he’ll have for its creation.

“The question is: How much performance are we going to get from him?” Stieglitz said. “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.”

With the Vin Diesel question remaining open, I suggested that perhaps the studio should have another chat with Karl Urban.

“I think,” Stieglitz said, laughing, “you’ve figured out the strategy.”