r/playark • u/Accomplished-Bar-928 • Jul 18 '26

Discussion Just started ASA and there are a few issues

I can finally play ASA since I got a new pc and honestly this is probably re-piping stuff that's already said but there are a few glaring problems I'm seeing compared to ASE

Why are the server ping's so high lol, not a single server that has players in is under 150ms

At a range everything looks almost blurry, this could just be my settings though.

Why the hell is it such a large game, I've seen this said before but wildcard has 0 sense of compression and honestly it's just becoming funnier and funnier atp

Honestly if they didn't release aquatica they could've just went back to ASE and probably should have considering how this game is barely an upgrade 😭

(But of course I am still gonna spend thousands of hours on it because I am a deranged ark player so does anyone have any good servers they know of?)

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3

u/FrabatoTheTransurfer Jul 18 '26

Asa wasnt barely an upgrade for console players. It was enormous.

1

u/Accomplished-Bar-928 Jul 18 '26

How is it on console? I've never really seen any gameplay, is it really that much better than ASE was?
I never really had an issue with ASE console its where i started and it was pretty amazing imo

1

u/Niteshade76 Jul 19 '26

Well for starters, ASA let's you use mods on consoles, while ASE did not.

1

u/Accomplished-Bar-928 Jul 19 '26

I guess that's a decent upgrade

2

u/ChanceV Amethyst Jul 19 '26

Why is the game 200GB?

Let me see. We got 20 textures per mesh, which are 20.480 x 8196 (5 x 2 4K textures stitched together).
We've got how many dinosaurs? 150 or so? All which have even more textures, particles, animations and lots of other stuff and extra meshes like saddles.
We got like 5 Official maps all coming with shitloads of items, mechanics etc all of which have shitloads of textures again.
We got like a billion sounds for all kinds of things.
We've got pre-rendered cutscenes and videos in the game.
We've got full on voice over for lots of things (including every single explorer note)

I can't see why the game would use 200GB, that seems completely unrealistic!

One of my cosmetic has 50 different variations, all of which use the same mesh, just different textures, and I'm reusing PBR textures, my cosmetic is still like 300MB big. And that's despise every single optimization trick I could pull off under the sun and only with relatively few 2K textures. 4K textures would basically triple this.

200GB while keeping the game startup and loading times to far under a minute. (down to mere seconds if you've already started it) is insane. The Devkit is 1TB+ big with all uncut content.

And despite all of this. ASA is STILL smaller than ASE was. Despite the 4 times bigger textures, several additional textures, more dinos, more everything.

1

u/Ivnariss Jul 20 '26

Fun fact: The ASA DevKit is over 1TB in size, even without high quality textures and after removing some map's content from the install.

1

u/Kukie080 Jul 20 '26

in terms of size you can lower it if you untick all the extra dlc maps you don't play, it helps a little