WILDCARD ARK Mobile will have crossplay between Android and iOS

While 2017 saw the popular PC, Xbox One and PS4 game leave early access, parent company Wildcard Properties have announced new ambitious projects in 2018. ARK Survival Evolved Mobile is coming to iOS and Android this year via Wardrum Studios, while fans can also expect the popular survival title to arrive on Nintendo Switch too. With the recent releases of both Fortnite and PUBG on phones, it’s certainly an interesting time for gamers. Each title has varying support when it comes to bluetooth controllers, crossplay and microtransactions. So it’s probably a good time to find out what’s coming to ARK Survival Evolved on Mobile too. Going by the footage recently released by Wildcard for the mobile version, it certainly looks like an ambitious project. And speaking to the Express Online, we now know exactly what kind of limitations and new gameplay mechanics are coming to ARK Mobile. Below you can find a new FAQ, providing answers on upcoming microtransactions, controller support and the lack of crossplay with PS4 and Xbox One.

ARK Survival Evolved: ALL the new content and Tek Tier screenshots Fri, March 10, 2017 ALL the new content from the latest ARK Survival Evolved updates. Play slideshow STUDIO WILDCARD 1 of 54 New story content for ARK Survival Evolved

CONTROLLER SUPPORT IS COMING TO ARK MOBILE Controller support is forthcoming, but it hasn’t been a huge priority since we’ve been very focused on the challenge of making this game feel great with touch controls. We’ve got a lot of experience with this and have millions of happy players with our previous adaptations. We’re going touch only on the beta though, as we need as much useful feedback as possible. IN-GAME CHAT WILL USE SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR TEXT SUPPORT We actually have an interesting solution for in-game chat. It’s too resource intensive to support voice chat with so many simultaneous players, so we came up with a neat way to tap into Siri and Google’s Cloud Speech API. You tap a button, and the speech recognition systems convert what you say to text, which is broadcast to your desired chat channel. We also tied in some basic game commands such as the whistles and emotes into this system, though it’s purely optional. NO CROSSPLAY FOR ARK MOBILE AND PS4, XBOX ONE AND PC Since gathering rates, gameplay mechanics, and new game functionality differ enough, it would be difficult to include cross platform support. We also had to do a full engine overhaul in order to make the game fit on mobile devices. BUT THERE WILL CROSSPLAY SUPPORT BETWEEN MOBILE PLATFORMS We do support full cross platform usage between iOS and Android, including a token entry system that lets you pair an Android device and an iOS device with the same account on a server. That way if a player has an Android phone and iOS tablet, they can play with the same character on both.