Earlier this year, we got an update from Ark developer Studio Wildcard admitting that Ark 2 could be years away despite being revealed all the way back in 2020, and now the team says it's "our intention" to release Ark 2 in 2028 - eight years after that initial reveal trailer.
Stemming from an article over at Epic Games Store about Ark: Survival Ascended and its upcoming roadmap, Wildcard's Jeremy Stieglitz said that it was the team's "intention" to release Ark 2 in 2028, with content planned for its Ark remake throughout 2026 and 2027.
"That’s our intention [...] 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."
While the team has a rough outline for when Ark 2 may eventually launch, it sounds as though the content within the game itself is still very much up in the air. For instance, Stieglitz says "we have a much more ambitious narrative built out for ARK 2" but that narrative is "highly dependent on just how involved Vin Diesel is actually going to be, which is still an open question".
"The question is: How much performance are we going to get from him? 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."
Reading these quotes, it even sounds like 2028 could be pretty ambitious for the full launch of Ark 2 on Xbox (and Game Pass; as was mentioned when the game was first announced). Could this dino-sequel end up arriving as much as 10 years after its TGA 2020 reveal? Who really knows, but Studio Wildcard's plan right now is 2028...ish.