Back in 2018, the Switch received one of its worst and most unplayable ports in console history, a notable accolade considering how many rough-and-ready games are on the platform. You may know it since it’s a fairly popular first-person open-world survival simulator called Ark: Survival Evolved. Now, four years after its initial release, ark has a new Switch port with a newer version of Unreal, and it might be one of the most impressive upgrades to a Switch game I’ve seen.
There were some miracle ports on the Switch. games like The witcher 3 and sinking 2016 not only look good on the aging port able hybrid console, they play well too. It’s not easy, mind you. The Switch is old and not very powerful, so running modern, large, snazzy-looking 3D games on it is a challenge. I mean, even Nintendo released games like the new ones Pokemon fight on it
ark on Switch in 2018 wasn’t just bad, it was really, really awful. Lots of websites and Critics have called it one of, if not the, worst port released for Switch. It featured incredibly low resolution and a terribly poor framerate, with tons of stuttering and stuttering.
Even when it was doing well, it looked like shit, with lots of blurry objects and blurry shapes floating around. Some of these were supposed to be dinosaurs or trees, apparently. It was difficult to say. This Digital Foundry Videos from 2018 is a great look at the port and how badly it played. Fast forward a few years and now this month a brand new version of the popular survival game comes to Switch. And folks, it’s kind of impressive how much better things are.
Eurogamer and Digital Foundry took a look at this new port and spoke to the developers behind it. Apparently the entire game was rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal 4. In fact, according to the developers, nothing remains of the original game. Instead, this port is based on a newer Xbox build of the game. New port developer Grove Street Games (yes, the same people behind the hated, shaky GTA trilogy Last year’s remaster…) also uses dynamic resolution scaling to make things look sharper and run better on the Switch.
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The new port of ark offers nicer shadows and less pop-in thanks to new tools available in UE4. Even better, the notoriously long loading times have been slashed to just around 30 seconds. That’s still a lot, but keep in mind that it can take up to three minutes in the original port. So yeah, big improvements all around.
To be clear, this is still a rough way to play Ark: Survival Evolved compared to more powerful platforms. Of course, playing the game on newer, more powerful consoles or a beefy PC offers a much better experience. But for people who prefer portable games or just have a Switch, it’s nice to see a publisher go back and spend the money and time to completely fix a bad port and replace it with something much better. You don’t see that very often, and while the new port still has its own problems, the new version is a day-and-night improvement that should be applauded.
Ark: Survival Evolved – Ultimate Survivor Edition is available now on Switch and is available for free to previous owners of the legacy port. Maybe The Outer Worlds can get a better port next?
