Ark: Survival Ascended has stark visual improvements, with incredible lighting, realistic and reactive water, detailed creatures with dynamic movement, and some absolutely stunning landscapes. It also has put significant attention to detail into structure-building mechanics which are intuitive and satisfying along with a host of convenience upgrades from the original game. Though visual improvements may seem superficial, they are an incredible part of the revival of the game as they bring the game to life in a way that drastically improves immersion, and makes every moment in the game, even the “grinding” for wood and stone materials, vastly more enjoyable.

This could be considered a smart aim towards the future of gaming hardware as well, as products push for higher and higher refresh rates and resolutions across the board from monitors to GPUs. However, it also falls into a pressure point of the gaming hardware industry: though ARK itself makes recommendations for the GPU required to handle a given resolution as you adjust your settings, its requirements for such incredible displays are intensive, and it's recommended you play with a 3080 or equivalent, or better. Unfortunately, even a cursory glance at the mixed game reviews on Steam shows that this may not satisfy most consumers: only the highest-end hardware seems to be able to run the game well.

Any Ark fan can testify to the game’s penchant for crashing, as is somewhat expected for a game of this complexity, and with immense strain on the GPU, this can be an even more stark problem. The experience of playing on anything less than a 4070 Ti Super can be frustratingly disappointing, to say the least. Unless GPUs come a little closer to a reasonable costs, games like Ark can feel inaccessible for budget gamers, even when attempting to lower resolutions and fps settings, and puts the game in an almost before-its-time rut until the rest of the industry and economy catches up.

Unfortunately for Ark, this is accompanied by a host of similar accessibility issues that plague the game: the new paid mods feature has many reviewers in an uproar over yet another paywall being erected, this time making money off of mods created by players rather than work done by the company itself. Further than that, the experience of playing on the base game unofficial servers is still frustrating when updates can cause save data erasure, and you have to pay a significant monthly fee to another separate provider just to play on a private server. While this part is not entirely new to the game series, it is a clear point of issue for incoming and returning players, and makes the game a lot less friendly to beginners in general.

However, this is not the only game caught in a lose-lose situation as they continue to improve the quality and complexity of their games, while the PC hardware that can perform them properly is locked behind higher and higher paywalls. While GPU prices in 2024 are trending downward overall driven by improved supply chains, reduced mining demand, and competitive market dynamics, the high-end models continue to command higher prices. From a consumer perspective, it makes the most sense to look for deals on previous-generation GPUs as newer models enter the market and stabilize--but with games like ARK requiring higher and higher performance to match the hardware, many consumers are simply stuck without a satisfying solution and must wait for the market to correct itself. Hopefully, the trend downwards continues and we see budget PC gamers gaining access to the full joy of ARK soon.