ARK: Survival Evolved is celebrating its birthday with a new expansion, but fans are furious and ranting about the trailer.
What kind of expansion is this? ARK: Survival Evolved will turn 10 years old in June, and for the anniversary, the popular survival game is getting a new expansion called ARK: Aquatica. The new DLC is set to be released in June 2025 and will be 95% underwater.
However, ARK: Aquatica is not being developed by ARK’s developer Wildcard but by the publisher SnailGames. They released a trailer for the DLC on March 18, but it has not been well received by the game’s community.
You can watch the trailer here, but be warned: if you like ARK, the trailer might upset you.
No information, no gameplay, but a lot of AI
Why are fans so angry? The trailer for ARK: Aquatica looks as if it was almost entirely generated by artificial intelligence and shows neither the gameplay of the expansion nor the map that the DLC will bring.
Overall, the trailer gives fans the impression that the publisher has not understood at all why ARK is so popular among them. Instead, an underwater world is portrayed, of which every ARK player knows that the footage shown definitely did not originate from the game.
The trailer gathered only 475 “likes” on YouTube within a day, despite having over 160,000 views.
“There’s a bit of ARK in your AI”
What exactly are fans saying? We have gathered a few comments on YouTube that reflect the mood of the community.
- Syntac: “This is disgusting, and you should be ashamed.”
- Fire-Ice-GG: “Please sell the Ark franchise to someone else.”
- Astromaniac: “How do I delete someone else’s video from the internet?”
- valkymeow: “There’s a bit of ARK in your AI”
- TheAxeManLP: “This is disgusting. You have no connection to your audience.”
However, there are many more posts and comments like this – no matter where you look, whether on YouTube, X, or Reddit.
On Reddit, there is a post with over 2,200 upvotes that says: “Please do not buy ARK: Aquatica for the sake of the game.” Another post on Reddit recommends that instead of being “exploited” by ARK: Aquatica, ARK players should support fan-made mods like ARK: Sunken World on Steam.
A user in the comments on YouTube also shows understanding for Wildcard, that they distanced themselves from ARK: Aquatica before the trailer was released: “Well, that explains the tweet from Wildcard that they are not involved.” Wildcard clarified in a tweet on March 18 that SnailGames is responsible for the expansion and that they are instead working on ARK: Survival Ascended and ARK 2: After 2 years of silence, the developers speak about ARK 2, but it is not what fans want to hear
