Ark 2 is now set to come out in 2028, and it may not have as much Vin Diesel as we were expecting: After years of delays, his involvement is 'an open question'

Ark 2 was revealed almost exactly five years ago—on December 10, 2020—with a lengthy cinematic trailer starring, for reasons I still don't entirely understand, Vin Diesel. It was initially expected to come out in 2023, and then at the end of 2024, but by 2025—the year that's about to end—we were reduced to promises that, yes, it's still happening. The most recent release target we had put Ark 2 in 2027, "if all goes to plan."

All did not go to plan, and Studio Wildcard is now aiming to get Ark 2 out the door sometime in 2028, according to an Epic Games report.

"That’s our intention," studio co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz said. "One of the things about doing Ark 2 was that we felt we had to learn a lot more about how to make the kind of game we wanted to do, and to do it kind of in phases. Learning about both the technology and the mechanics seemed, to us, safer than to just try to go and release a whole standalone product called Ark 2."

Stieglitz said that many mechanics and features in Ark 2 will be introduced first in Legacy of Santiago, a major expansion for Ark: Survival Ascended that will also serve as "a prequel to Ark 2 that basically directly ties into that narrative." Legacy of Santiago is currently expected to arrive in late 2027, at the tail end of Ark's current roadmap.

And then, finally, Ark 2 in 2028—if all goes to plan, which sounds to me like a pretty soft commitment at this point.

"Legacy of Santiago will allow us to explore a lot of mechanics that we want to do with Ark 2, but it kind of derisks that," Stieglitz said. "Essentially, if we don't do it right, if we don't do it perfectly, we're able to iterate on it with a live game and get a lot more feedback than to just release something standalone. It's much safer for us to get a lot of that feedback in a live game where we can react much more fluidly to what players are telling us."

Stieglitz also said that while the big hook of Ark 2's original announcement was Vin Diesel's starring role, he may not actually have much to do with it. Ark 2 has a "much more ambitious narrative" than Ark: Survival Ascended, he said, but "it’s really going to be highly dependent on just how involved Vin Diesel is actually going to be, which is still an open question."

"The question is: How much performance are we going to get from him? Are we going to get one day, five days, eight hours? You don’t know. And the scope of how much performance we are going to get determines just how the narrative is going to play out. We have a narrative that’s if we get a lot of Vin Diesel, this is what we will do, and if we get a little Vin Diesel, this is what we will do."

Personally, I feel like you should have some idea about how much performance you're going to get out of a guy before you announce him as your starring performer, especially since he was made an executive producer on Ark 2 and named Studio Wildcards's "President of Creative Convergence" back in 2020. At the same time, though, this was all supposed to be wrapped up two years ago and now we're looking at it happening maybe three years from now. At some point (a point which is well past, to be clear) I think Vin is well within his rights to say, listen, I have other things to do.

One possible backup plan? Huge Karl.

At first I thought that was Dave Bautista about to give some poor bastard the what-for, but no, that is in fact Karl Urban, previously the voice of massively huge guy Bob in Ark: The Animated Series, and now actually the massively huge guy Bob in Ark: Survival Ascended. He's even getting his own Bob's True Tales expansions.

I don't think Urban has ever been nearly that slabberific in real life—there are at least two actual Karls stuffed in there—but such is the magic of videogames. And this newly enhugened Karl may also provide a way around the potential Vin shortage in Ark 2: When asked about possibly shifting the focus to Urban for Ark 2, Stieglitz replied—laughing, apparently, so it's impossible to say how serious he is—"I think you've figured out the strategy."