Ark Survival Ascended Lost Colony is built on huge new features like NPC thralls

It's a milestone year for Ark, and Studio Wildcard is ensuring it's a memorable one. Celebrating the franchise's tenth birthday, we've already seen Ark Survival Ascended add the remastered Ragnarok DLC to its suite of expansions and receive an engine upgrade. The original game, Ark Survival Evolved, is also getting an unexpected new expansion, Aquatica. But the icing on the birthday cake will be Lost Colony, the first all-new expansion for ASA, which is set to drop in December. In an exclusive interview with PCGamesN, Studio Wildcard co-founders Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz reveal what it's been like to finally inject some original content into Survival Ascended and discuss some of the new features and innovations the highly anticipated DLC will bring.

Ark Survival Ascended is already heavy with remastered expansions, and Ragnarok is the latest. Adding one of Ark's biggest and most beautiful maps, alongside a host of iconic creatures, its debut in ASA has resulted in a healthy uplift of players. However, for so many Ark fans, it's a world they've seen before - and that's why the prospect of Lost Colony is so exciting. When I ask Stieglitz why thousands of players still haven't made the jump from ASE to ASA, one of the three core reasons he gives (alongside tech restraints and time invested in the original game) is that they want to see something properly new. "They actually want a reason, creatively, to reinvest their time," he says. Well, the next expansion will give them just that.

"People are starting to get just a little taste of it now with the Lost Colony Expansion Pass we released [alongside Ragnarok]," says Rapczak - the pass adds a few gameplay mechanics and creatures to the game that will feature in the full release of the expansion, but more on those later. "It's just the tip of the iceberg. The whole map and all that new content coming later is, I think, really gonna blow people away in terms of furthering the Ark story and tying it into what we plan to do later with these characters in Ark 2 and beyond."

"Previously, the only really, truly original content we had released for ASA was Bob's Tall Tales, which was more like a gameplay feature set," Steiglitz adds. "It's like, 'here's some cool items and creatures,' but it wasn't like a new world or a new story."

Given this radical switch from remastering old content to creating something fresh for the same game, I ask if Studio Wildcard has suffered any whiplash from it, or if it's been an enjoyable experience. "It's really about dusting off the old creative skills that the team's been using for more short term improvements, [but now] thinking more long term about how we create a whole new world, whole new map, whole new characters, and new storytelling elements, and that's been really rewarding," Rapczak says. "It's something the team has been looking forward to for a long time.

"[We're] expanding the way we tell stories in the game. Recently, we got a new mocap facility set up at our Seattle office. We've been diving into Unreal's new Metahuman toolsets for some of our characters in the game. Jeremy has been getting a lot of our voice talent from [Ark The Animated Series] and other areas to reprise their roles in the game, and our returning talent has been very excited to come back and voice new content for this expansion. The team is having great fun building Lost Colony from the concept phase up, unbounded by what we did before [in Survival Evolved]."

Plenty is already known about Lost Colony. As Rapczak alludes to, it'll feature iconic characters (and their famous voice actors) from Ark The Animated Series. We know that it'll take place on Arat Prime, a frozen planet that lore-heads will have learned about a few times over the years. And we know that it will tee up the story for Ark 2, the ambitious sequel that Stieglitz tells me may still be a couple of years away.

As mentioned, with the Lost Colony Expansion Pass dropping alongside Ragnarok, players can go hands-on with some of the new gameplay changes early. Already available right now are the Drakelings (new miniature dragons that give you strong passive buffs), the Veilwyn tame, a new tool that can save sections of your base as templates that you can use again, and Ark's first-ever player skill tree.

"Even though this may have serious long-term meta game impacts to how Ark works, [Lost Colony adds] a skill tree, which is an entirely new concept in Ark but obviously exists in other games like Path of Exile," Stieglitz says. "But to really do that in a thorough way in Ark [means] going off in a very new direction."

As for what else is arriving in December, Stieglitz teases an unannounced feature making its debut in Lost Colony. It has been requested a fair amount over the years, and it's a core component of fellow survival game Conan Exiles.

"One of the ideas in Lost Colony is NPC thralls that you can sway to your side, and the idea of being able to assemble an army in that way is something that we've not really experimented with in Ark," he tells me. "[We're] really trying to deal with human antagonistic NPCs in that space as well. So it'll be very experimental. Some of it relates to things we also intend to [include] in Ark 2. It's, to some extent, a way of seeing what works and what doesn't before, you know, an entirely new sequel that really can't afford to miss with some of its mechanical experimentation. So Lost Colony affords us a slightly less monumental way of having to experiment with some of those types of mechanics."

Speaking more broadly, Rapczak notes that the world of Arat Prime is also "constructed around new types of gameplay we're putting [into Lost Colony] that haven't existed in Ark before."

Despite all of Wildcard's efforts to push Ark's gameplay forward and make Lost Colony a genuinely new experience that could draw more players over to Survival Ascended, Stieglitz knows that it's important that the team doesn't "lose sight of [Ark's] roots."

"We're a creature survival game," he says, definitively. "So there's got to be really cool tames. They have to be important to how the map works and to traversing the map and to surviving the map. That always has to be there. But within that kind of framework, what can we do to make the game experience have more layers and depth that doesn't necessarily take away from the creature aspect?"

As mentioned, Ark Survival Ascended's Lost Colony expansion is due to launch in December 2025. It's arguably the most important moment for Studio Wildcard since ASA launched, not only for the impact it might have on that game, but how it will crack the door open to give us a glimpse of what Ark 2 could be - both in terms of its narrative and its gameplay evolutions.