In an update described as ‘a roller coaster of emotions’, the dev team for Ark: Survival Evolved confirmed that yes, the game has officially gone gold, but it’s not going to meet its initial release date of August 8. The game, and its free DLC Ragnarok, have both been pushed to August 29.
The reason given is that going gold took longer than the team expected. The post says the team are deeply apologetic for the delay, and that they ‘wanted to address this sooner but did not want to make any statements until we were completely sure of what was going to happen.’
The good news is that the delay is allowing the team more time to work on the Ragnarok update, which will now apparently be ‘gigantic’, increasing the size of the overground world by around a quarter. It adds new biomes, new engrams, a new epic boss encounter, and ‘something secret’ that hasn’t been revealed yet. The team is also working on fixes and patches to address community concerns and make everything super stable.
The fairly last minute delay is similar to the extremely last minute delay of Dream Daddy: A Daddy Dating Simulator, but that proved very popular when it released a few days later.
Ark: Survival evolved is definitely not a dating sim, it’s an action adventure survival game with a lot of dinosaurs and things. It’s been in early access for a while, and is due to launch fully on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on August 29 (at least, it is now).
