Ark: Survival Ascended is the worst optimised Unreal Engine 5 game we've seen on console
Ark: Survival Ascended is the worst optimised Unreal Engine 5 game we've seen on console
DF investigates Ark: Survival Ascended. Is this the worst optimised Unreal Engine 5 game we've ever seen? PS5, Series X, Series S and PC tested.
Original Ark fans: First time?
A friend of mine once showed me that he played Ark on the Switch. At that point I didn't even know there was a Switch port, and I was wondering how playable it could be.
Ten minutes in : holy hell what a mess.
It ran like shit, and somehow looked worse than Turok on the N64.
They've apparently made huge improvements to it since.
Good to see nothing has changed from the days of the original Switch port of the first game. The one with trees that ran at such a low LOD that they just floated. The one that often ran at 180p. The one that they had to contract an outside dev just to remake it competently.
Don't give these guys money. One of the worst studios out there.
I'm Shocked. SHOCKED. I can't believe it. Not Wildcard!
Isn't unreal kinda famous for doing a fair bit of the optimizing for itself to get those crazy visuals? How did they fumble a package that was already half done for them?
Epic provides an engine with a lot of features including a wide swath of performance optimizing tools, but it's still up to the developers to implement the concepts and workflows correctly to keep their project bloat free at runtime. The 'crazy visuals' you're used to seeing from Unreal are always going to be big studios with a team dedicated to working on optimization, or for projects that aren't realtime or aren't interactive.