Ark Survival Ascended's Unreal Engine 5.7 upgrade is a "magic bullet" for performance and opens the door for new platforms

For Studio Wildcard's co-founder and development director, Jeremy Stieglitz, there's a "golden trio" of elements that need to come together to lure fans from its ageing but adored Ark Survival Evolved over to the shinier, newer Ark Survival Ascended. First, put some Unreal Engine 5 glitz on classic Ark content. Second, cook up and serve all-new expansions that are only available in ASA - something it's finally delivering on with Lost Colony, which launched this month. And thirdly, improve performance. Ark's never been the smoothest, most-polished of experiences, and so the quest of making ASA a slick survival game that can support new innovations without taking steps back, performance-wise, is an important one. While 2026 will bring plenty more upgrades and fixes to Survival Ascended, Stieglitz is very excited about its upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.7 in particular. Why? Within UE5.7 is a "magic bullet" change that should make drastic improvements to ASA on PC - and could see it arrive on new platforms like the Nintendo Switch 2.

I've been speaking to Stieglitz in the wake of Lost Colony's launch. It's a massively ambitious DLC that brings several new mechanics to Ark Survival Ascended, but there have been some performance and bug grumbles since it dropped. Looking through Lost Colony's user reviews on Steam, this appears to be one of the main reasons why it sits on a disappointing 'mixed' rating. While new additions and content will always put new strains on a game, Stieglitz knows Studio Wildcard needs to do better.

"[ASA] still doesn't run well enough," he concedes. "The good news is it runs better than it did at launch, not just because people have better hardware, but like by any measure, people can see that it runs like 40 to 50% better on the same hardware versus when it launched in October 2023. It's not good enough yet, but better than it was.

"So how do we get it to run [even] better? Well, thankfully, Epic has already done most of that work. The newer version of the engine called Unreal 5.7 runs a lot better than the old version, Unreal 5.5. Unfortunately, we're still on Unreal Engine 5.5 and upgrading these things isn't trivial, but we're already working on upgrading to Unreal Engine 5.7 and we expect to have that out by the end of March 2026."

Naturally, an engine upgrade should benefit any regularly supported game, but one particular improvement in UE 5.7 could be huge news for Ark Survival Ascended.

"We've already got some of the metrics, and that's going to result in about a third [33%] performance benefit […] It's funny, because a [big] area Epic has worked on for this new version the engine is on large scale foliage. [You've seen that in] their Witcher demo and so forth. It literally directly applies to what our game is doing. And I know it sounds crazy, but from our initial tests, it largely is as close to a magic bullet as you tend to get in videogames. It's like an option. You turn it on, say, 'Ok, [with] all the foliage, the trees, and bushes and stuff, I want to use the new method of nanite tessellation and not the old method.' And you kind of turn it on and, boom, your performance is way better. There are very few drawbacks to it. There's no real artifacts or overheads that we have found thus far, and the performance is night and day."

Stieglitz says this engine upgrade is going to allow Studio Wildcard to think bigger and broader - he reveals to me that the developer is "currently exploring" a Nintendo Switch 2 port.

"It's in active development," he says. "I can't tell you when it's gonna come out, because there's still some unknowns. But we have builds on Nintendo Switch 2, straight up, and it is only doable because of that newer version [of Unreal]. Otherwise it would be impossible forever - [Survival Ascended] was not within [viable] performance specifications for that console, except now the 5.7 nanite tessellation has a profound impact on how the game runs. We started actually doing that work for Nintendo Switch to see where it was leading, and it's so significant that we've kind of prioritized getting that engine upgrade done as soon as we can in the new year, and debugging it, getting it out for release on the existing platforms."

I jokingly ask if Tim Sweeney will be getting a Christmas card from Stieglitz this year, due to the huge potential this single Unreal Engine improvement is bringing.

"Yeah, they definitely have done some really good work," Steiglitz says. "And credit to Epic for never resting on their laurels. They are obviously in pole position on industry technology. It'd be easy for them to get lazy, as other companies have in the past who have some kind of monopolistic technology. It's easy to say, 'Well, we're so good, we don't need to improve.' But Epic has resisted, thus far, the tendency of industry leaders to not continue to advance the state of their products - I don't know if that's going to stay that way forever, but I credit a lot of it to Tim Sweeney's technical leadership over there. Epic's not a perfect company. No company is. But on that front, there's a lot to be [admired] about how they have operated over the last ten years or so."

Be sure to look out for more from my interview with Stieglitz, in which we discuss Ark Survival Ascended's newly revealed roadmap, which brings yet more original content and major features to the game.