Developer Studio Wildcard had already said that it is hoping for a 2028 launch window for ARK 2, and that many of the game’s mechanics would be seen in the upcoming Legacy of Santiago expansion for ARK: Survival Ascended. Studio co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz has revealed more details about this plan in an interview with WCCFTech.
Stieglitz, who also works as creative director, lead designer, lead programmer and development director at Studio Wildcard, spoke about wanting to get player feedback for some of the new gameplay mechanics that we will see in Legacy of Santiago. Much like the last time he spoke about this, he noted that this helps the studio with reducing risks for ARK 2.
“We’re taking a lot of the systems developed for ARK 2 and moving them into Legacy of Santiago because we’d like to get player feedback on them and prototype them to reduce risk,” he said. “Every game can have an expansion pack that’s a ‘miss,’ and you just move on, but if you have a whole new game that’s a miss, it can be a company-ending thing. Legacy of Santiago is a way to see how features like the new combat perform in a live environment over time.”
Just last month, Stieglitz had spoken about some of these new features coming to ARK: Survival Ascended with the release of Legacy of Santiago in Q4 2027. He noted that, while the expansion won’t feature the narrative things we can expect from ARK 2 when it finally launches, it will bring with it things like Soulslike third-person melee combat. He also noted that these systems being received well could lead to ARK 2‘s major selling point becoming its worldbuilding and narrative.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Stieglitz had also spoken about the lessons that Studio Wildcard learned when it had decided to stop development on ARK: Survival Evolved to instead focus more on ARK: Survival Ascended and ARK 2. He noted how fans of Survival Evolved got angry at the developer because they wanted more content and they weren’t ready to move on to a new game just yet.
“One thing we learned is to not say goodbye until your players want you to. 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,” he said.
