ARK: Survival Ascended Multiplayer Now Working on Steam Deck

ARK: Survival Ascended was released quite unexpectedly a couple of days ago, and so far, it has been a little rocky on the Steam Deck. With crashes at the character creation screen and general performance issues, this has been a bit of a rough beginning, but it seems Studio Wildcard is working hard to fix that! In an update yesterday, BattlEye anti-cheat has been updated to be enabled for the Steam Deck, allowing us to connect to official servers and play with other people!

The update, 25.12, had three different fixes along with it. which fixed crashes and exploits, but the 4th change that was brought was enabling BattlEye for the Deck. Before the update, the anti-cheat would automatically kick anyone playing on a Steam Deck out and not allow them to join the server. But thankfully, that has been changed now. This was a client update too, which means it will require a download. According to our writer, Oliver, it broke the installation, and he had to re-download the entire game.

I can't say much on performance just yet, but Oliver is hard at work testing the game for a game review. It should be out relatively soon, but it seems optimistic and playable to some degree.

ARK: Survival Ascended is currently available on Steam for $40.49. It is a full remake of the first game, ARK: Survival Evolved, in Unreal Engine 5. It does have some new features and dinos and will include all DLC added over time, so it could be a worthwhile investment if you enjoyed the original! But beware, it needs a solid amount of power to run.

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