ARK Survival Ascended is getting an MMO-like social hub spot with mini-games

Modified Jun 15, 2024 13:36 IST

ARK Club ARK Survival Ascended — ARK Club is coming next week (Image via Studio Wildcard)

ARK Survival Ascended teased an unexpected new feature: an in-game virtual club where you can hang out with your friends. This upcoming feature, called Club ARK, will make it into the game next week and was the headliner showcase of the recent Community Crunch. However, some of the finer details need to be filled out.

The community has been long looking forward to such a social hub spot feature, but it's uncertain how exactly Studio Wildcard will implement it or whether it will be a DLC feature.

Club ARK will add roleplaying potential and social features to ARK Survival Ascended, but we don't know if it's free yet

ARK Club might have a Western theme (Image via Studio Wildcard)

ARK Survival Ascended has recently raised a few eyebrows with the inclusion of a standalone $5 DLC for a single creature. The tame in question, Pyromane, is also quite powerful to boot. Such a pay-to-win nature has a precedent in Ark Survival Ascended: the Oasisaur tame, which is only obtainable with the Frontier Adventure pack DLC.

The trend of releasing DLC-locked powerful paid creatures will continue with the ARK: Fantastic Tame series, which plans to add more such mythical creatures.

In light of these various paid inclusions, many fans are concerned about whether the upcoming ARK Club will also be a paid creature. Chances are that this will just be integrated into the base game with a free update, but Community Crunch #414 did not specify that.

Thus far, the only known feature of ARK Club is that it will be a social-space hub spot where PvE and PvP players can partake in various mini-games. The blog post's wording gives it the identity of an Old West saloon, which thematically resonates with the Scorched Earth map.

How the studio will implement this social space into ARK Survival Ascended remains to be seen. We don't know whether it will be a new zone in maps with weapon use restrictions or a server of its own that players can drop into. All we know is that it's coming next week, likely alongside the ARK x Power Rangers crossover.

ARK Survival Ascended is also adding a new back-end feature to support ARK Club: dynamic distribution of cosmetics. This will add a toggleable option to let your game download assets for different cosmetics in the background while you play so you can see what your fellow server-mates are sporting.

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Edited by Angad Sharma