ARK Aquatica - KeyArt
Snail Games seems to have once again dug deep into the clearance section of ARK: Survival Evolved and thought, "Why be creative ourselves when we can just buy abandoned mods?" It certainly looks like they grabbed a few hardly used underwater mods like The Sunken World or Additional Creatures: Aquaria and cobbled together a "brand new" DLC map from them.
You can easily picture the scenario: Snail-Boss Shi Hai is relaxing on a Sunday evening with a round of Subnautica to briefly escape the stress of slowly but surely driving the AKR franchise, "captured" by Wildcard, into the ground. The next morning, he takes a look at the Steam player numbers and is horrified to find that many long-time ARK: Survival Evolved players are still not ready to switch to ARK: Survival Ascended – let alone pre-order ARK 2.
Shock horror! A plan is urgently needed to monetize the remaining resistance. So quick action is taken GUESS: A few discarded ASE mods spotted, handed a few dollars to the already inactive modders, brought in 1-2 dudes from the abandoned Grapeshot team (because, well, Atlas is dead anyway), and voilà – a new "premium" mod map for summer 2025 was born:
- 17 new creatures
- 60 new engrams
- 10 new cooking recipes
- 95% of the map is underwater world
Note: This may all seem like nonsense – so don’t take it too seriously.. But that’s exactly my first impression.. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY!!! Check out the video below from Raasclark!
To be clear, this DLC is not from Wildcard and will hardly have the quality one is used to. It is rather irritating that content is coming for a definitively dead version (ASE)!
