Studio Wildcard has announced that modding support has now become available in Ark: Survival Evolved, the game that has sold more than a million copies in under a month and made more than $10 million in revenue while still being in Early Access.
Over on the Steam news page [via PC Gamer], the developers announced that they have partnered with Epic Games to provide gamers with the necessary modding tools from the Unreal Engine 4 to allow modders to go wild on Ark: Survival Evolved.
According to Studio Wildcard, they stated in the following in the news post...
The Ark Dev Kit is a simplified version of the Unreal Engine 4 Editor specifically compiled to streamline the process of creating Mods & Maps for the Unreal Engine 4 game Ark: Survival Evolved, and to upload them directly to Steam Workshop for other users to download and play,
Steam Workshop support for a game like this is kind of crazy. I also wonder how this will work for an MMO like Ark? In a game like Garry's Mod people join servers where the mods are already loaded, but outside of private servers will gamers be able to experience these mods in multiplayer games without any problems? Facepunch Studios has been attempting to perfect this process for years in Garry's Mod, so we'll see if Studio Wildcard will be able to bring their game up to par in a shorter amount of time using the Unreal Engine 4 tools.
According to the post, gamers can override everything within the game, including the core survival concepts. This opens up the Unreal Engine-powered dinosaur survival title for all sorts of total conversion mods. I don't know about anyone else, but one of the first story-oriented mods someone needs to make is one based on Jurassic Park. This game is just begging for it.
At the moment there are already a few mods over in the Steam Workshop section, mostly for the express purpose of providing gamers with a template to make other mods.
Nothing is off limits for editing and modifying the game. They outline that AI behavior and conduct can be modified, so if you want talking dinosaurs that greet you and wave... you can do that. They make it known that if you want to mount machine guns on a T-Rex and go around shooting down everything in sight... you can do that. They state that buildings and structures can be made and imported into the game, so if you wanted to recreate the visitor center from Jurassic Park or make a crossover with Terminator and import a detailed rendition of Skynet... you can do that.
The possibilities are literally limitless once you get the right tools into your hands and Studio Wildcard and Epic Games are ensuring that you get the right tools into your hands.
Of course, not everyone has the ability or skills to create and make awesome mods. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and they've provided a dedicated section for Ark over on the Unreal Engine forums.
